Toby Bartels wrote:
All of this is why, when we change the title of
pages,
we should turn them into redirects instead of
deleting
them. I almost left out the word "should" in the line
above, and a year ago I would have been able to do that.
Normally I would agree with you, but in this case the talk pages were retitled because people wanted that phrase to stop appearing so much in Wikipedia, and renaming the talk pages AKFD was one suggested solution to this without having to lose the content itself. Leaving a redirect to the renamed page would not have solved the problem which was apparently that there were too many pages with this title. Normally redirects themselves don't cause any issues, so it is better to keep them than delete them, but as the discussions on [[Talk:AKFD/redirect]] and [[Talk:AKFD/November 2003]] show, it was decided that the redirects themselves were causing harm which is why I deleted them.
Deleting redirects is a problem, but sometimes keeping them is more of a problem. For example where it makes it unreasonably difficult to find similarly named articles, where the redirect might cause confusion, the redirect is offensive or the redirect makes no sense. There are more details and discussion of the policy at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion]] and [[Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy/redirects]].
Angela.
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