Wiktionary:Redirections

This is a Wiktionary policy, guideline or common practices page. This is a draft proposal. It is unofficial, and it is unknown whether it is widely accepted by Wiktionary editors. Policies – Entries: CFI - EL - NORM - NPOV - QUOTE - REDIR - DELETE. Languages: LT - AXX. Others: BLOCK - BOTS - VOTES.

A redirect is a page which automatically sends visitors to another page, usually an entry or section of an entry. See Help:Redirect for technical information about redirects. In Wiktionary, redirects are used only for a restricted set of purposes and are avoided otherwise.

Unacceptable uses

Redirects should never be used:

1. For alternative forms, such as accrument being an alternative form of accruement; instead templates like {{alternative form of}} should be used. This includes different hyphenation forms and different spellings of words.
2. For misspellings; use {{misspelling of}} instead.
3. For different word forms, including plurals, such as worked being the simple past and past participle of to work; this will lose any information about the inflected form, and similar words may exist in other languages with possible unrelated meaning.
4. Between lowercase and uppercase words: Wiktionary is case-sensitive regarding the first letter of a page title, and if one enters the uppercase word in the search box, the software automatically redirects to the lowercase article unless the uppercase exists. If both entries exist (such as Work and work), a reference on both the lower- and the uppercase page must be made to one another using {{also}} on the top of both pages.
5. From accentless (diacriticless) forms to accented ones: The search mechanism is adept at finding entries with diacritics in the title from diacriticless searches, and the entry title may turn out to be a title valid for another language. If both entries exist, a reference using {{also}} should also be used.
6. From one script to another: Because the redirect is ambiguous to the reader and the entry title may turn out to be a title valid for another language. However a soft redirect may be made from transliterations if there is consensus for them.
7. For translations or abbreviation expansions: Instead create a normal entry for them.

Acceptable uses

There are a few acceptable uses, as described in Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion:

1. Attested repetitive form with more than three repetitions shall be redirected to the entry having three repetitions.
2. Combining characters should be redirected to their non-combining forms if the latter exist.
3. Minor variants of phrases where there is little or no chance of the entry title being valid for another language, including inflected forms, should be redirected to the main entries.
4. Individual Unicode characters that depict digraphs should be redirected to their two-character versions.
5. All fullwidth and halfwidth characters should be redirected to their normal forms.
6. A symbol only used as part of a matched pair should be redirected to the matched-pair entry.

These uses of redirects are also de facto acceptable:

1. Other forms of multi-word idioms: for example, burn his fingers may redirect to the pronoun-neutral, uninflected form burn one’s fingers.
2. Entries using alternative punctuation marks, such as curly (typographic) quotation marks and apostrophes (“, ”, ‘, and ’).
3. Sum-of-part terms that are likely to be searched, to the part that the meaning mainly derived from.

Other namespaces

Different rules apply to pages in namespaces other than the main one. It is acceptable for such a page to redirect to another within reason. There are certain guidelines:

1. It is possible to create template "aliases" by redirecting one template to another. For example, the widely used Template:m is actually a redirect to Template:mention. Template aliases should be created sparingly, as they make entry maintenance more difficult. Most templates do not require an alias, and those that do should generally have only one, although exceptions exist.
2. Main namespace entries must not redirect to non-main namespace pages, and vice versa. In some cases, pages in non-main namespaces can harmlessly redirect to a different non-main namespace (such as Help: and Wiktionary:). The only exception to that rule is Wiktionary:Main page, which has several main namespace redirects.
3. For technical reasons, categories cannot redirect to other categories without causing technical difficulties. If a category is being renamed (“moved”), use {{movecat}}, which is designed to combat these technical problems.

See also

• Wiktionary:Entry layout
• Wiktionary:Entry titles
• Wiktionary:Misspellings
• Special:ListRedirects – lists all redirects