Minecraft Wiki talk:Projects/Redirect cleanup

Organizing the redirects once we decide what to do about them
Can we apply categories to redirects? What if we had a few categories:
 * Category:English variant redirects,
 * Category:Lowercase redirects,
 * Category:Plural redirects,
 * Category:Feature redirects,
 * Category:Historical name redirects,
 * Category:Common name redirects,
 * and so on. Whatever categories we ultimately decide

It may facilitate the project -- though I'm also thinking of later benefits, such as:
 * There could be a maintenance page dedicated to uncategorized redirects (to decide whether they're good or not),
 * Several of those redirects, like 'english variant', 'historical name' or 'common name' redirects, should (probably?) not be used in wikilinks; wikilinks should use the in-game name. So if we had those in a category, or categories, those could be checked from time to time, in bulk, to see that they're not used in pages.  They would just be terms for the search bar.

Just thoughts. – Sealbudsman talk/contr 16:42, 9 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Excellent idea, that will help to keep unnecessary redirects out after the project is done. –Majr ᐸ Talk Contribs 23:15, 9 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Support. I'm not entirely too sure about this, but Wikipedia uses templates on redirect pages (such as here), and it might help here as well, with the template adding the category to the redirect. - MinecraftPhotos4U (talk) 19:43, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Plural redirects
The style guide currently advises using link suffixes if possible to avoid needing extra redirects, but many plural redirects still exist.
 * Case for
 * Allows slightly more readable source text:  is easier to read than
 * Allows searching for plural terms (does anyone actually do this?)


 * Case against
 * Isn't necessary for most links due to link suffixes
 * Is useless in search suggestions, making it more difficult to find pages

Feel free to add your own points for or against plural redirects.

I see 3 choices:
 * 1) Allow plural redirects
 * 2) Only allow plural redirects for plurals which aren't a suffix (e.g: "Wolves", "Blocks of Coal")
 * 3) Don't allow plural redirects


 * I vote for option 2. –Majr ᐸ Talk Contribs 23:37, 9 August 2016 (UTC)


 * I'm also in favor of #2, I feel it's in keeping with style guide so far, and I'm not sure people searching for a plural wouldn't just see the singular pop up, as they type. – Sealbudsman talk/contr 00:43, 10 August 2016 (UTC)


 * I would also agree with #2, though I can see potential for confusion among new editors when making plural links. Basically, a lot of new users don't know about the plural link trick, so will likely try the formerly redirected version and see it as a redlink to create (which at best recreates a deleted redirect and at worst creates a duplicate article). – KnightMiner  · (t) 03:33, 10 August 2016 (UTC)


 * I also like #2; however, less experienced wiki editors may not know that link suffixes work. They're likely to either attempt to link to the missing plural redirect, or use a piped link (e.g., ). The former isn't hard to fix, and the latter isn't technically wrong – a bot can check for those periodically. I'm fine with getting rid of unneeded redirects, but be aware that this does make the wiki a little less friendly for new and casual editors. -- Orthotopetalk 03:39, 10 August 2016 (UTC)


 * #2 pretty much seems like the obvious option. As such, that's the one I'm supporting. - MinecraftPhotos4U (talk) 19:43, 8 February 2017 (UTC)


 * I would only support use of redirects for actual in-game item / block names, no plurals. #3 - DSquirrelGM &#120035;&#120031;&#120018; 17:55, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Counterproductive project
Redirects may have links from other websites. It may be best if we keep the redirects. The BlobsPaper.png 04:06, 27 February 2017 (UTC)


 * I'm quite happy to sacrifice ancient external links in order to make search suggestions actually usable, plus we can include a link to the real page in the deletion reason so any one that does end up there can still easily get to the right page, without it cluttering the search. –Majr ᐸ Talk Contribs 04:17, 27 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Seems like a decent idea. If the original author of the linking site has abandoned work on the site for a long enough time, it's probably too outdated to be reputable/trustworthy anyway, and up-to-date sites will be able to fix their links easily enough.- MinecraftPhotos4U (talk) 08:33, 27 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Adding on to this, redirects should never be used to support external links which are invalid in ANY case. Quite simply, there's no excuse for incorrect links on their part as the links are made. DSquirrelGM &#120035;&#120031;&#120018; 13:05, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Talk pages and user pages
Should we be able to edit talk page comments for the sole purpose of removing these redirects? It wouldn't change the functionality of the pages at all, so I don't see it as too much of a deal. - MinecraftPhotos4U (talk) 07:43, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

On a similar note, could user pages be edited for the same reason? It feels a bit rude to edit someone else's user page(s), but then again it's their responsibility to take care of it; as such, they should be responsible for patching up any broken links. Helping out by fixing these up doesn't seem to be way too bad, but I'm kind of on the fence. Should this too be an allowable movement? - MinecraftPhotos4U (talk) 10:11, 31 March 2017 (UTC)