Board Thread:The Scriptorium/@comment-206.123.250.91-20140402145622

As I start out on my quest to help the wiki one of the first things I like to do to help familiar myself with the wiki is look at all the current pages of the wiki (for those who don't know how to do that visit this page: Special:AllPages) . After doing so I noticed about half of the pages on the wiki are redirects (note in the previous link all the italics are redirects). So I hopped into one and checked to make sure not pages were linking to it and marked it for deletion. After which another user popped in and undid my edits and we ended up discussing the need for redirects. Since this affects everyone I figured I'd make a post here so we can decide as a wiki what we'd like to do.

In the past wiki's I've worked on redirect were only ment to be temporary while you were changing a page to another and until you could find all the links on the rest of the wiki pointing to it. After changing the links that go to the new page the redirect page can then be marked for deletion so that they do not clutter up the wiki as they are then essentially useless pages.

Now the other user brought up the point that there is a possibility that an outside link from another webpage could point to the article in question and that deleting the article even after fixing all the links in the wiki would then make that link go to a dead end, especially if it is an old article. As such any article written and then redirected should be left as a redirect to keep outside links from being broken and allow those links to be redirected to the correct information.

I understand that this is a valid reason for choosing to leave a redirect but in my mind it is unnecessary to worry about links from outside the wiki to the page. Anyone who links to the page can always change their link to the correct information and even if they didn't there is still a chance it would go to a dead end page if they made a mistake typing in the url to the atricle in question. As such I do not think we should be concerned with outside links.

So I wanted to present it for discussion to the community to help make a decision as I had originally planned to go through and fix the redirects and mark the pages for deletion, however if the community decides they'd prefer to have the redirects left permanently I'll not do it.

TLDR (Too Long Didn't Read) : Should redirects being a permant page since they could be linked from outside the wiki or should they be temporary pages that are used until the links in the wiki are fixed and then deleted? 