On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 3:56 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, and the only solution is a frank admission that redirect is a form of delete, and that a change to redirect if challenged requires an AfD, and a change in deletion policy to say this. ditto for a destructive merge, but it would be much harder to quantify what amounts to "destructive" in such cases.
I hate this more than anything else I find as a reader on Wikipedia, when I am looking for some fact. When I go to some article, and it's a redirect, and the target article is not a synonym for the word, and doesn't even contain the word... argh. I can't think of one off the top of my head, but I'm sure everyone has had this happen a few times.
Seems like something a bot could weed out pretty easily. Redirects to pages that don't include the redirect text in the article. Sometimes they are synonyms, misspellings etc, so a human might have to review.
I feel like if the redirect can't be to a particular section of the target article, or the word isn't a simple synonym or alternate spelling, a redirect is inappropriate. Call me crazy. :)