Wiktionary talk:Redirections

Paul G had an excellent description of when to hyphenate and when not to, floating around somewhere. That section (here) needs a little reworking, I think. --Connel MacKenzie T C 18:49, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Draft Policy on spelling variants
Some sections of this overlap with, and are probably adequately dealt with by Spelling Variants in Entry Names - Draft Policy. Perhaps we need to combine the two policies ?--Richardb 13:15, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Idioms
Is the redirect from rough around the edges to rough round the edges covered by this proposal? If not, should it be, or should the redirect not be there? &mdash;Celestianpower háblame 18:06, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

European language bias
Could there be more information about non-European languages and when and when not to redirect? For example, I am currently working on an entry for 大腕, to which there also exists the form 大腕儿. The two words are exactly the same but the latter just happens to use 儿化, a phenomenon of the Beijing dialect (and other Northern Dialects) of Chinese. I would prefer to redirect from the latter to the former for reasons of efficiency. Tooironic 01:47, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The first thing to consider is whether there could be cases where two different languages (as we distinguish them on en.wikt) use the terms that you want to turn into hard-redirects? If so, those types of entries shouldn't be turned into hard-redirects without engaging is some cross-language coordination. If not, then consider whether there would be benefit to the user in having separate entries (this allows separate space for citations, usage notes, etc). --Bequw → ¢ • τ 05:23, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Different hyphen characters
There are technically two characters that can be used as a hyphen, the "hyphen-minus" ( - ) or the "hyphen" ( ‐ ). There is no semantic difference between them when used linguistically to create compounds. I think it would be appropriate to allow hard redirects between the two forms. As the former is much easier to type, I think this could be the primary entry. This would allow un‐American to hard-redirect to un-American. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 05:14, 26 December 2009 (UTC)
 * The wikimedia search will find the hyphen-minus variants of a term when one searches for the hyphen variantion, so this isn't too necessary. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 20:17, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Different hyphen characters: What to do about existing redirects?
Forgive me for bringing up this issue for seemingly the first time in 8 years. I made a note on another user's talk page concerning a change in which a redirect from a word including one form of hyphenation to another was turned into its own separate entry, and concerning all other changes like it. I argued that since there is no semantic or useful distinction whatsoever between the two forms of hyphenation (in this case a hyphen-minus versus an en dash), there should not be any distinction to the user. So, what should be done? Should it be left as two separate entries? Bequw's comment might imply that one should be deleted entirely, or, if a redirect exists, that it should be deleted. And if so, which? According to Wikipedia's manual of style, as well as the general consensus for such names on Wikipedia (see here, here, and here for relevant examples), the en dash (–) would be the more correct form for the particular word I was referring to. Much still remains undecided on this matter, and I hope for the discussion to be reopened lest the issue continue to arise. — J&#8203;as&#8203;p&#8203;e&#8203;t 23:24, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Non-main space entries
We should put a short paragraph on redirects that are not main space entries, like redirecting to  - this sort of redirect shouldn't be deleted on sight. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:56, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

ambiguous redirects
I don't agree with the current rule 1:
 * Redirects should not be ambiguous or misleading. For example Template:Baseball can redirect to Template:baseball, but Template:BB would be unacceptable as it is too ambiguous.

There's a long tradition of ambiguously abbreviated names for redirects, including template:CW, template:alt spell, wt:SB, and wt:REE. I see no reason to stop creating such (and certainly no reason to delete existing ones!). &#x200b;—msh210℠ 17:59, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Good point. is another example. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:07, 8 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Agree with msh210 on this. I think there is a point where using abbreviations for titles can be problematic, but it seems like that should be covered somewhere else, perhaps at an about page for each namespace or something.  If we've decided that a certain abbreviation should be reserved as a redirect to something, then it should redirect there.  -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 03:33, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Changed. Mglovesfun (talk) 23:31, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

Ban on redirects to words involving special characters
Mglovesfun & Semperblotto recently deleted redirects from epouse and etre.

In the case of unused namespace, the current policy enforced by Mglovesfun & al. is actually unhelpful. For example, it is common to both see and write être without the circumflex in English. Someone searching for "etre" may find être in the search results, but suffers an unnecessary waste of time. Someone typing the term in from the browser address bar, such as myself, doesn't find anything at all.

If admins and moderators would like to take the time to create "misspelling" entries similar to accomodate, that is entirely their business, but it should not be wiktionary policy to remove helpful, time-saving aspects of the dictionary. My 2¢. -LlywelynII 22:42, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
 * In fact, rereading the policy page here, there actually is no support for their removals. But since some people obviously do feel that it is current policy to make words involving special characters difficult to get to from English-language keyboards, it's worth having some discussion and working out a consensus. -LlywelynII 22:45, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
 * If you read your talk page, it's because when you search for etre or epouse it suggests être and épouse without you even hitting enter! Also what would you do with privâtes - privates can't redirect to it! If etre is a word, create it with its meaning. If not, do nothing. Mglovesfun (talk) 00:16, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Furthermore, if either of them did exist in another language, they'd have to be replaced and an entries using the redirects would then link to an unrelated entry. Mglovesfun (talk) 00:20, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Also consider the fact that if an entry doesn't exist, the search box uses some fancy magic to relate "special" characters to their "normal" forms, if you type in the search box the first option given is .  Furthermore if you search for  which doesn't exist the search results page will suggest the other term to you.  There are lots of good reasons not to have the redirects. -  03:03, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Etre isn't a misspelling, it's simply être without the circumflex. --Mglovesfun (talk) 12:03, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

Rewritten
I've had a good go at rewriting this to actually reflect common practice. Redirects is one of those nice issue where the community seems to agree. FYI, the last version before I started editing it is here. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:27, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Wiktionary should fully embrace all usages of redirects now
Where there is no article, a redirect is more valuable than nothing. This is the attitude Wikipedia takes, and I see no logical or technical impediment that would block Wiktionary from embracing redirects other than stubbornness to make progress. These arguments suggest that there may be some very rare instances where an article would be more appropriate than a redirect. Nobody is arguing that articles be converted into redirects! However, a redirect is more valuable than no article and it's just astonishing to see Wiktionary suffer so much by the general dislike for redirects. --Bxj 11:56, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Our search engin is quite good; most of the time a redirect is significantly less valuable than nothing, as the redirect can only redirect to a single entry, while a search can display a range of possibilities. As pointed out, Wikipedia address concepts, so color/colour are a single concept, but two words! Regarding "Where there is no article, a redirect is more valuable than nothing." I think I know what you mean, but you should be clearer. For example, if I redirect buigyugfyeqUKF to house is that more valuable than nothing or less valuable? --Mglovesfun (talk) 12:02, 14 April 2011 (UTC)


 * The search engines are not "very good", they are in fact very poor and make it difficult to find anything, because the checkboxes for different places (definitions, help) do not appear, and each search is interrupted by a huge advertisement of the definition creation wizard, and makes it extremely difficult to even see that search results are there.


 * In most cases redirects should be used, because the words are exactly the same. There is no value to having work and worked as separate entries, because they literally mean exactly the same thing other then tense and any reader who does not know what "work" means will automatically, upon discovering that the word "work" exists, know that "worked" is the past tense of that word.   Redirects should not be used in cases where the words are actually different and have different meanings, such as "able" and "ability".  If the difference is minor or very semantic, it can be added to the entry...   and then redirected.RayvnEQ (talk) 08:33, 15 May 2015 (UTC)


 * A class of examples include Japanese terms, where each term has the kanji spelling, the hiragana spelling, and romaji spelling. They're not really spelling variants, really just the same word written in different writing systems. Also, I think linguists tend to have long debates about the definition of what is a word, so I can't say with confidence whether or not color and colour are different words. Back to the CJK world, an aside: I often find "Translingual" definition section of CJK ideograph entries as a little confusing or perhaps even problematic, perhaps discouraging users from adding different definitions for different languages as they should. --Bxj 02:09, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Proposal: actively encourage redirects for words that don't overlap with other languages
Most Japanese words can be written in at least three ways: kanji, hiragana, and romaji. These words by default do not have the language overlap issues, and when separate entries are not required, we shouldn't be creating separate pages, because that introduces out-of-sync issues for cloned content for each word. The shared alphabet situation that plague English does not exist for some writing systems, including Georgian, Japanese kana, hangul, Thai, etc. The situation is completely different.--Bxj 14:08, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Well romaji are Latin script and kanji are CJKV script, so that won't work. No, just keep 'em all. Georgian shares a script with a few other languages anyway, such as Laz and Old Georgian. --Mglovesfun (talk) 14:40, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Of course there are corner cases that needs different approaches, but what's wrong with, for example, having 捗る, はかどる, and hakadoru pointing to the same entry?--Bxj 15:42, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Another example is "futan": 負担, ふたん, and futan. This is a case of having three entries for a single word, which is clearly harmful and applies to a majority of the Japanese vocabulary. --Bxj 12:49, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't find this 'clearly harmful'. Also, we have which exists for this reason. --Mglovesfun (talk) 13:29, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I think you're in denial if you claim that you see nothing at all wrong with this picture.--Bxj 03:19, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I don't see anything wrong with this picture. And I doubt that "futan" is only a word in Japanese. --Yair rand 03:37, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Policy status
I have turned the page into policy-DP aka draft proposal. This seems fair given the page was originally a policy proposal, but there is no evidence at hand that what the page describes is actually a common practice supported by a consensus. A vote can turn the page into a formal policy. It seems better to tag the page as policy-DP than to have no tag at all: policy-PD says clearly that "It is unofficial, and it is unknown whether it is widely accepted by Wiktionary editors". --Dan Polansky 18:17, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

Periods
What do people think of redirects between forms of abbreviations with periods and without periods (e.g. Sgt. → Sgt)? Should we find & replace or allow? --Bequw → τ 19:29, 29 August 2011 (UTC)

Redirects from diacritic forms to diacriticless forms
The page currently states that redirects from forms without diacritics to forms with diacritics are not allowed. What about the reverse, for languages like Latin or Old English, where diacritics are generally not used? Should ċēosan be allowed to redirect to ceosan? 22:58, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * W/r/t the general issue, I still don't see the problem (or rationale behind deleting such redirects). The computer does not automatically fix them and they cause templates to malfunction or words to be needlessly duplicated at every use. Why not allow the redirects? LlywelynII (talk) 23:23, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Because we can't guarantee that the redirects will remain in place. A redirect must necessarily be "broken" when an entry is added in its place. For example, at first hund may have redirected to the German entry Hund. However, once hund itself required an entry, a redirect would no longer be possible. 23:26, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I still don't see how this is a counter-argument. We're creating the redirect instead of a "variant" page simply as a tidiness measure.


 * If such an entry were created, it would simply (and still) be required to create a Latin subsection listing the macronic form as a variant of the main entry (your German example is a little off-point, since "hund" is not actually a proper German variant for "Hund" – it'd imply it was some verb instead of the noun – whereas "amo" and "amō" are variant spellings of the same Latin entry). LlywelynII (talk) 23:34, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Redirects from Latin macronic forms to macronless entries
An apparent misunderstanding of the redirect policy here is causing some problems with Latin terms (requiring them to be written twice for linking and keeping them from working well with some templates). Discussion here and here, and hopeful revision of the current problematic consensuses here. LlywelynII (talk) 23:21, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

[CodeCat posted a more general form above as I was editing this, but the Latin question is particular owing to the effect of some of the Latin policies in combination with the redirect issue.] LlywelynII (talk) 23:21, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I think it is rather presumptuous to say that it is an apparent misunderstanding, and therefore imply that you alone know the "true meaning". Not a good way to start a discussion. 23:23, 27 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I'm sorry you take it that way, but it is in fact a misunderstanding and I was being polite with the "apparent". The policy Metaknowledge was "enforcing" when he deleted my redirect does not exist, is not what this page states, and (further) the rationale justifying the other policy does not apply in this instance. I'm sure he meant well and I am not recreating such entries until this is worked out. Maybe people prefer to write entries twice (or it's easier to code the database to automatically move Latin queries to the existing entries).


 * Regardless, as you pointed out by asking the question above, it's not the existing consensus now as he claimed at the time. LlywelynII (talk) 23:26, 27 December 2012 (UTC)


 * It remains consensus, AFAICT. And I have no idea what you mean with coding the database. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 23:32, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * AFAICT, it is not and hasn't been. Kindly reread the article or CodeCat's request for clarification above. I mean automatically redirecting at the code level, as with etre's automatically redirecting to être. [edit: Hey! That doesn't work any more! =) Stupid Bretons... Anyway, we should probably find a better example for this page now.] LlywelynII (talk) 23:38, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * My question doesn't imply at all that macron redirects are ok, though. I don't know where you got that from. 23:41, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * It implies precisely that there is no existing consensus to avoid them and I'm unsure why you'd take umbrage at the point. LlywelynII (talk) 00:01, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
 * If a situation is unclear or if there is any reason to doubt whether consensus exists, then that means discussion is needed first. It is similar to Wikipedia's practice of Bold-Revert-Discuss. Large changes such as the one you were making should always be discussed, as the implications of making the wrong assumption about consensus are much greater. A small change is easily reverted. Large changes could require months or even years to fix (as in the case with User:Verbo, whose edits we're still fixing today). 23:35, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I know you were taken aback by my phrasing above, but you should realize that's (a) what I'm doing and (b) what Meta was not doing or realizing. LlywelynII (talk) 23:38, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Looks like you don't really know what consensus means. Either that, or you're wikilawyering. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 23:41, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure why you're being such an insulting prat about this despite your inability to understand English sentences. Consensus is what you claimed to have despite having nothing of the sort; it is what we are now establishing thanks to the discussion I began following your reverts. Pretty much the reverse of the high ground you think you're on.


 * As I requested before, kindly review Help:Interacting_with_humans, particularly the part about being more considerate and the section below detailing how you should focus on the issue instead of unhelpful personal attacks. LlywelynII (talk) 00:01, 28 December 2012 (UTC)


 * LOL, pretty rich for you to say that right after making a personal attack. Anyway, the community agreed to not create entries with macra, the Latin editors agreed to abide by it, and we had discussions establishing that. That's consensus. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 00:05, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Again establishing that this began in a misunderstanding. There is also a consensus that we should use English in the word definitions, but that has no bearing on the topic at hand (redirects from the macronic forms). LlywelynII (talk) 00:23, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
 * A misunderstanding of what? Telling us we don't understand what we're doing doesn't really explain anything. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 00:26, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Reread above. (And not any "us", just you. Co[de]Cat requesting clarification and consensus (as I did) shows [s]he understands Wikipedia and Wiktionary consensus just fine.) LlywelynII (talk) 00:36, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
 * LOL. CodeCat, who by the way professes to be female, may not like being called "CopyCat". Anyway, you haven't actually answered my question, just so you know. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 00:39, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Name (shamefacedly) fixed. (And, yes, I did.) LlywelynII (talk) 00:51, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Nice anchor. But I think we've gotten past that point, because I thought we'd agreed that I evidently said "policy" when I should've said "consensus". Of course, now you're nitpicking over that. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 00:54, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Except there's no consensus either. That's what we're discussing now and the misunderstanding is your continued assertion that there already is one and that the discussion is moot. LlywelynII (talk) 00:59, 28 December 2012 (UTC)
 * There is a consensus. You simly disagree with it.  There's a difference between lack of consensus and lack of unanimity. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:23, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

Inactive policy
This policy draft predates Votes/pl-2008-08/Inclusion of regular inflected forms. In various places it basically says "Sometimes you can make redirects here." while it isn't true today. I believe I was able to move all the usable information into WT:EL and WT:CFI. For that reason, I am marking this as and removing it from the list of policies at. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 14:06, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
 * made the page active again. Then there was some rewrite, mostly condensation, it seems. In, I restored it to the policy draft proposal status that it had before. Note also below, resulting in the page being kept. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:01, 24 November 2018 (UTC)

RFD
From old WT:RFDO revision:

Outdated pages. I got everything I wanted from them and created a vote to have WT:EL with that information, which passed in November/2015.

I marked them as, which says: "This page is no longer active. It is being kept for historical interest. No discussion is needed to revive this page; simply remove the tag and bring it up to date.", but is there any historical interest in keeping them? Sure, Redirections indicates that in the past we used to have more redirects than now, but we could update User:Dixtosa/Wiktionary:History of the English Wiktionary with that information. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:25, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
 * 'Outdated' isn't a deletion rationale per se as you can update pages, this being a wiki and all. The question is really are these pages superseded. Redirections sounds like a good idea, although I'm surprised how long it is as our 'policy' is pretty simple. Unless it's superseded I'd be tempted to almost start again with that page and make it half the size. Not read the other page. Has that been superseded by anything? Renard Migrant (talk) 12:43, 24 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep: Wikipedians, etc. regularly drop by and try to 'fix' us by applying their substantially different view on redirects. When checking our redirect habits, it is common practice for them to type redirect, redirect wt:redirect, or WT:REDIR straight into their browsers' URL cells. For that reason alone, I think completely deleting this page will cause more harm than good so I strongly oppose this. Warmest Regards, :)—thecurran Speak your mind my past 07:13, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep for now, though I wouldn't object if WT:SPELL and WT:REDIR redirect to relevant portions of WT:EL, provided such relevant portions are written first. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 11:56, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep Redirections and replace the content with up to date information about redirects. Neutral on Spelling variants in entry names. — Godsy (talk • contribs) 05:09, 20 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep Redirections It is a useful guide for users of Wikipedia. Just require an update. Goodtiming8871 (talk) 01:31, 19 September 2017 (UTC)
 * keep Consdiering y'all are waaay different with your "no upper to lowercase" stuff. L3X1 (talk) 02:21, 9 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Kept --Gente como tú (talk) 13:00, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Meaning of "matched pair"?
The last item of the first list at the Acceptable uses section reads:

"6. A symbol only used as part of a matched pair should be redirected to the matched pair."

I don't understand what a matched pair is in this context. We don't have an entry at matched pair, and neither does Wikipedia. A google search of "matched pair" (even adding a term like "language" or "linguistics" to the query) doesn't turn up anything plausible. My best guess is that this is related to logographic writing systems? If we could add an example I think it would help clarify. Colin M (talk) 20:00, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Phrases with and without commas
I am unsure whether a phrase with/without a comma counts as "alternative forms... includ[ing] different hyphenation forms" (redirect not OK), or as "using alternative punctuation marks, such as curly (typographic) quotation marks and apostrophes" (redirect OK). Specifically, should dura lex sed lex be a redirect to dura lex, sed lex, or an entry listing it as an alternative? -- Perey (talk) 10:26, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Redirecting -fast (bedfast, rainfast etc) to fast
It looks like -fast used to be a suffix or at least it was used like one, but the meaning is pretty much directly the same as https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fast#English

But I don't see an example saying this is or isn't ok?

FWIW -fast was a page once, but got deleted AncientSwordRage (talk) 16:23, 12 December 2021 (UTC)