Wikipedia:Soft redirect

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Shortcut: WP:SRD

A soft redirect is a very short page that essentially tells the user to look at another site to obtain the information they were seeking. The technique is particularly likely to be used when redirecting users across wikis - thus (at the time of writing) Wikipedia:Milestones is a soft redirect to meta:Milestones.

Normal or "hard" redirects would be undesirable in these circumstances because they could not be undone without hand-crafting the correct URL (because there would be no "Redirected from [foo]" message on the page when you get to the destination, so there would be nothing to click on to take you back to the redirect page, and clicking on a link to the redirect page would take you straight to the redirect's target). There would also be infinite loop security considerations. Therefore hard interwiki redirects have been disabled and soft redirects are often used.

A soft redirect can also be useful if one wants to link to it from its target, as an invitation to create an article, like a red link. Just like a red link looks different from an ordinary link, a link to a soft redirect can look different using the stub feature. See also Redirect and/or link to non-existing page.

[edit] Soft redirects from Wikipedia to Wiktionary

Sometimes an entry is more appropriate on Wiktionary than Wikipedia, but it is for a word that is commonly wikified. Normally, we either:

transwiki such articles from Wikipedia to Wiktionary, then delete the article from Wikipedia; or
expand the article into something more encyclopedic, if appropriate.

For entries we choose to transwiki and delete, it is quite likely that the deleted entry on Wikipedia will be re-created again by well-meaning users. The re-created article is likely to be another simple dictionary definition, just as inappropriate for Wikipedia as the original.

To avoid this, do not delete after transwiki'ing. Instead, create a soft redirect to Wiktionary on the Wikipedia page by inserting the {{wi}} template on the Wikipedia page. This template automatically creates a soft redirect to Wiktionary, which has multiple benefits:

it brings the two projects closer together as they should be; and
it prevents future clean up issues.

However, please keep in mind that only commonly wikified words should be soft redirects. We don't need a soft redirect for every word in the Wiktionary.

As an alternative, it is sometimes suitable to redirect the word to a relevant article within Wikipedia. For instance, Organize could redirect to Wikt:Organize, but it would also be suitable to redirect it to Organization.