This page contains suggested guidance about keeping soft-redirected pages for categories.
For basic information on this topic, see WP:CATRED. This topic is not to be confused with WP:Categorizing redirects.
Alternative treatments of category redirects
Category redirects are usually created and left behind after a category is renamed. This happens whether the category is processed by a bot or a human editor.
There are three possible courses of action concerning these redirects:
- Delete. Many such redirects are unlikely to be helpful to editors in the future, so they should be deleted. These include:
- cases where the original name was mis-spelled or poorly chosen
- redirects from a different capitalisation.
- Convert to a category disambiguation page. If the category was renamed because it is ambiguous, and categories exist for two or more meanings, then create a category disambiguation page at the old name, using {{category disambiguation}}.
- Note that we usually only do this at an unused category name which is ambiguous, e.g. Category:Lewis. If an ambiguous name is used for an active category because it is clearly the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, and there are only 1 or 2 others, then use a hatnote like the one at Category:Lewes. For longer lists, we can also create pages such as Category:Bedford (disambiguation).
- After converting a category page, note that its category talk page may still have a hard redirect to the renamed category talk page; replace this with {{WikiProject Disambiguation}}.
- Keep where the category redirect might be useful.
Category redirects that might be useful
The following sets out various cases where it is useful to keep category redirects.
- ASCII to diacritics (etc), as people are highly liable to re-use the versions of names that can be typed using a standard keyboard. In particular, we keep redirects from names with hyphens to names that require a dash (according to the guidance in WP:DASH), such as date ranges.
- Alternative spellings and WP:ENGVAR, especially "organisations"/"organizations".
- Alternative WP:DATERANGE formats that editors might well try to use.
- Categories for objects which had other names in the recent past, if there are many items in the category and there is a chance that someone could use a past name.
- E.g. football team players under previous club names. The same applies to players of other sports, and team managers and if there is a potentially large population for the category.
- Redirects from other category pages that are not easily fixed, e.g. year categories for a country that has changed its name.
- Specialised navigation templates can be built for such cases, e.g. those in Category:20th-century establishments templates by country, but in many cases it is probably not worth the effort, and category redirects provide a sufficient work-around.
- The template {{navseasoncats}} now makes use of category redirect pages to provide navigation links straddling changes of name. Such redirects should be tagged with {{R from category navigation}} so that editors will not delete them unwittingly.
- Generally, names that editors might try to use again, and which will help editors to find the current name, e.g. Roman Catholic → Catholic, Bolton → Metropolitan Borough of Bolton.
- Consider whether the redirect will be helpful for editors using WP:HotCat, which autofills depending on the what has been typed so far.
- So for e.g. Category:People from the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, editors are going to try "People from Bolton", so keep "People from Bolton (district)" or "People from Bolton (borough)" – but not both, because one of those would be sufficient.
- Redirects where there are many incoming links from talk pages/ CFD pages etc, or where such discussions may have continuing importance. In these cases, redirects will help interested editors to trace the precedent discussions.
- Redirects from category merges where both pages have significant page history, which might be worth keeping for attribution.
- Redirects from category merges where other-language Wikipedias are still using both categories. In these cases, keeping the redirect may help another editor or a future bot-process to trace and merge categories in the other Wikipedias.