[Wikipedia-l] on redirection

[Daniel Mayer]

On Saturday 06 July 2002 05:57 am, you wrote:
> Sean Barrett wrote:
> >I take back nine-tenths of my earlier comment; you've done a fine job of
> >incorporating the subpages.  I have deleted all of them except
> >Government and Geography, and I'll delete them Real Soon Now.
>
> Aren't we supposed to redirect these instead of deleting them,
> in case search engines have indexed them?
>
> BTW, you missed [[/History]], probably because it isn't an orphan.
> But it's been incorporated just like all of the others.
> I made it a redirect for now.
>
>
> -- Toby Bartels

Yes they are supposed to be redirected to whereever the content was moved to 
-- that is made very clear on our policy of permanent deletion of pages. I 
just did a Google search on Svalbard and did see all the / pages for that 
article, clicked on Svalbard/Communications and got a blank page stating 
"Describe the new page here." -- which isn't good.

Being careful not to break links is one of the central concepts of good 
webpage design -- please redirect in the future. Redirects are harmless and 
as soon as the move feature is fixed, will be easier to make than manually 
moving material to new page names and deleting the old page titles (although 
in this case, the subpages should have been simply redirected to [[Svalbard]] 
since their content was moved and integrated there). 

--maveric149