Minecraft Wiki:Projects/Redirect cleanup



Having loads of useless redirects makes search suggestions useless, making it more difficult to find pages. Many of these redirects are left over from old page names which we haven't used for years (for example when we used to name everything in disambiguation format...), and others are created due to lazy linking which perhaps doesn't need to be quite so lazy.

What makes a useful redirect?

 * Primarily, anything someone would search for when trying to find an item, or game feature:
 * Exact names used in the game
 * Names of certain specific features (e.g.: "Armorer")
 * Very common alternate names (e.g.: Loads of people call "stone" "smooth stone", despite that never being an official name. "AI" is an alternate name for "Mob"). Names invented by YouTubers or other notable members of the fandom should probably not be included (e.g.: "Butter" for Gold, "Googlies" for Zombies)
 * Non-American English variant spelling (e.g.: "Armour"), possibly excluding joke English language variants
 * Common link targets, in order to avoid piped links to reduce page clutter. (MCW:STYLE)
 * TODO: Are plurals useful?
 * Proposal: Only keep plural redirects if the singular word does not fit exactly inside the plural. For example, wolves is acceptable as the word "wolf" cannot be seen in its full form, however zombies would not be acceptable as the singular word zombie fits in in its plural, and as such the link can be changed to the equally functional zombies .
 * Lowercase names
 * Historical names

Tasks

 * Figure out criteria for useful redirects
 * Amend style guide to match criteria
 * Sort redirects to be removed
 * Check redirects are not used on prominent external sites
 * Mark redirects which can't be deleted due to external usage with a template and/or category
 * Delete unused redirects
 * Categorise remaining useful redirects