Wifedogging

This page documents an English Wikipedia editing guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcuts: WP:SRD WP:SOFTRDR

A soft redirect is a very short page that essentially tells users to look at another site to obtain the information they were seeking.

The technique is particularly likely to be used when redirecting users across Wikimedia sister projects — for example Wikipedia:Milestones is a soft redirect to meta:Milestones. Normal or "hard" redirects would be undesirable in these circumstances because they could not be easily edited without hand-crafting the correct URL: clicking on a link to the redirect page would take you straight to the redirect's target and there would be no "Redirected from foo" message to click, so it would be difficult to return to the redirect page itself. There would also be infinite loop security considerations. Therefore hard interwiki redirects have been disabled and soft redirects are often used.

The following templates are used to create a soft redirect link:

• {{Soft redirect}} for all soft redirects except those below;
• {{Category redirect}} for category redirects;
• {{Wiktionary redirect}} or {{wi}} for Wiktionary redirects.

Soft redirects to non-English language editions of Wikipedia should be avoided because they will generally be unhelpful to English-language readers.

For purposes of administration, particularly deletion, soft redirects are subject to the same administration processes as regular redirects, and should not be handled by processes that are intended for articles. For deletion this means that soft redirects are subject to R2 - R3 speedy deletion criteria, and are not subject to A1 - A10 speedy deletion criteria. For more deliberative deletion, soft redirects should be handled through Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion, and are not subject to either Wikipedia:Proposed deletion or Wikipedia:Articles for deletion. They are also specifically subject to G8 deletion if their target does not exist, as this has replaced the old R1 criteria.

Internal vs External Use

Soft redirects are intended mostly for external use, where hard redirects will not function. In general, for internal use, hard redirects should be used instead. There are a few exceptions where the internal use of soft redirects makes sense:

• A soft redirect can be useful if one wants to link to it from its target, as an invitation to create an article, like a red link. Just as a red link looks different from an ordinary link, a link to a soft redirect can look different using the stub link feature. See also Redirect and/or link to non-existing page.
• There are times when a hard redirect is too subtle, and a message expressly explaining the redirection is needed. Cross namespace redirection and preserving historical value are examples of this type of situation.

See also

• Help:InterWikimedia links list of possible redirects.
• m:Soft redirect metawiki page about soft redirect
• Wikipedia:Redirect for hard redirects
• {{Redirect with possibilities}}
• Wikipedia:Deletion policy#Other projects, where a soft redirect is considered an alternative to deletion
• m:Help:Transwiki, for instructions for using the Transwiki: namespace when moving entries between Wikipedia and Wiktionary