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User:Emmette Hernandez Coleman/Deleting redirects to facilitate searching

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Although essay this is in my user-space, please feel free to edit it. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk)


It's often helpful to think of deleting a redirect as re-targeting it to search page. If you delete a redirect, then when our readers look it up in the search box, they end up at the search page.

Limitations

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When a redirect is deleted, you don't always end up at a search page:

  • If you follow an internal link, The Terrible Towers, you arrive at the editing interface to create an article (with a note that the title has been previously deleted).
  • If you arrive at the former redirect's url (e.g. a link from an external site, entering the URL directly, bookmarks, some external search methods), http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/The_Terrible_Towers, then you get the note that the title has been previously deleted above the "Wikipedia doesn't have an article with this exact title" message, inviting you to search. (MediaWiki:Noarticletext)
  • If you arrive by using the internal search engine [1] or some external search tools (e.g. the Firefox search shortcut from the URL bar [2]) you get the search page.

People use all these methods and more to search and navigate Wikipedia so the user experience is unpredictable.