Wikipedia:Redirect/Deletion reasons

The major reasons why deletion of redirects is harmful are:

• a redirect may contain nontrivial edit history;
• if a redirect is reasonably old, then it is quite possible that its deletion will break links in old, historical versions of some other articles — such an event is very difficult to envision and even detect.

Therefore consider the deletion only of either really harmful redirects or of very recent ones.

You might want to delete a redirect if one or more of the following conditions is met (but note also the exceptions listed below this list):

1. The redirect page makes it unreasonably difficult for users to locate similarly named articles via the search engine.
2. The redirect might cause confusion. For example, if "Adam B. Smith" was redirected to "Andrew B. Smith", because Andrew was accidentally called Adam in one source, this could cause confusion with the article on Adam Smith, so it should be deleted.
3. The redirect is offensive, such as "Joe Bloggs is a Loser" to "Joe Bloggs", unless "Joe Bloggs is a Loser" is discussed in the article.
4. The redirect makes no sense, such as redirecting Google to love.
5. It is a cross-space redirect out of article space, such as one pointing into the User or Wikipedia namespace. The major exceptions to this rule are the "WP:" shortcut redirects (like WP:RFD), "CAT:" shortcut redirects and "WT:" shortcut redirects, which technically are in the main article space but in practice form their own "pseudo-namespaces". All "articles" beginning with "WP:" are in fact redirects.
6. If the redirect is broken, meaning it redirects to an article that does not exist or itself, it can be deleted immediately, though you should check that there is not an alternative place it could be appropriately redirected to first.

However, avoid deleting such redirects if:

1. They have a potentially useful page history. If the redirect was created by renaming a page with that name, and the page history just mentions the renaming, and for one of the reasons above you want to delete the page, copy the page history to the Talk page of the article it redirects to. The act of renaming is useful page history, and even more so if there has been discussion on the page name.
2. They would aid accidental linking and make the creation of duplicate articles less likely, whether by redirecting a plural to a singular, by redirecting a frequent misspelling to a correct spelling, by redirecting a misnomer to a correct term, by redirecting to a synonym, etc. In other words, redirects with no incoming links are not candidates for deletion on those grounds because they are of benefit to the browsing user. Some extra vigilance by editors will be required to minimize the occurrence of those frequent misspellings in the article texts because the linkified misspellings will not appear as broken links.
3. They aid searches on certain terms.
4. You risk breaking external or internal links by deleting the redirect. Old CamelCase links and old subpage links should be left alone in case there are any existing external links pointing to them.
5. Someone finds them useful. Hint: If someone says they find a redirect useful, they probably do. You might not find it useful — this is not because the other person is a liar, but because you browse Wikipedia in different ways.
6. The redirect is to a plural form or to a singular form.