Requests for Comment/We should keep redirects when moving pages

I previously began this discussion 2 months ago on Allistayrian's talk page on CGW. https://crappygames.miraheze.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Wfiqjx76cckpvi55

Allistayrian suggested us to ask bureaucrats instead as that is an admin policy, so I am bringing it here. It looks like the redirect was later undeleted though. However, I have noticed some other moves such as Pay to win games to Pay-to-win games. In my opinion, keeping the redirect would be beneficial because firstly, pages that contain a hyperlink to the title without hyphens will not show a red link and it will take you to the intended page, therefore less work needed to correct red links. Secondly, if you type something like "pay to win" in the search, it shows nothing in the search prediction because the search prediction does not ignore punctuation characters (although you will find it in the search). Thirdly, if someone links the article outside of CGW before the move, it will be a dead link.

'''EDIT: I forgot to mention for the proposal that we should continue to delete useless redirects such as misspellings. But we should keep redirects that are change in capitalization or grammar.''' —Atomicstar (talk) 11:34, 18 October 2021 (UTC) EDIT 2: Also categories shouldn’t be kept —Atomicstar (talk) 15:01, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Oppose

 * 1) Sorry, but no. They clog up the wikis, so what's the point? --DarkMatterMan4500 (talk) 01:32, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Could you explain what you mean by it clogging up the wikis? They are uncategorized so they won’t add unnecessary duplicates to categories. They do show up in search results, but I don’t understand why it is a negative. —Atomicstar (talk) 11:34, 18 October 2021 (UTC)


 * 1) They can make navigating pages take longer, which is the problem I've been having, plus they will tend to clog the wikis up. Mr. Jay 641  (📄) 2:14, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Could you explain how it makes navigating pages take longer? If there is a link to the old page, the link would be dead, unless you spend the effort to fix all red links that deleting the redirect caused. I’m not really understanding what you mean. —Atomicstar (talk) 05:36, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * My point earlier before your note was, when I use the search to find a page and I type in the first words of a page especially a few months ago, I sometimes ended up seeing a bunch of similar names in a list and because of that, I have to guess which name is the current name and when I do that, I most times end up seeing double redirects causing me to keep clicking each double redirect until I get to the actual page. Plus most likely others have this problem too. I see that users on these wikis tend to keep moving pages more than once with leaving redirects behind making it sometimes harder to find the page. Also I can't delete broken redirects on those wikis because I'm only a regular user there but hopefully one day I become an admin. Mr. Jay 641 (📄) 15:25, 18 October 2021 (UTC)


 * 1) Overall, I disagree, especially regarding the old redirects of categories. Old redirects of standard pages are tolerable, depending on how they are written (for example we should delete the redirect which contains the grammar, spelling mistake or the title is too long), but redirects like Half-Life to Half-Life (video game) or Dragon's Lair (NES) to Dragon's Lair (1990) on gaming wikis is more user-friendly. —A llistayrian  (💬) 08:10, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * 2) They make navigating to pages take a lot longer, especially for pages that have been moved multiple times. Wing Commander confed star.pngTigerBlazer  12:46, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * 3) Removing the redirects makes navigation of the site much easier. I feel that the only kinds of redirects that should exist are alternate titles of a piece of media and general names of shows that went downhill (ie. main page "Family Guy (Seasons 8-present)" and redirect "Family Guy"). Marxo Grouch  (talk) 15:10, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * 4) It will clog up the wikis to an extream. We just need to delete and fix the broken links. King Dice (talk) 01:42, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
 * 5) 'with a strong recommendation of immediately closing this request Per above. SleepParalysisDemon (talk) 22:02, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Abstain

 * 1) Redirects are tricky. I used to be much more fond of them. The fact most internet traffic tends to come with search engine queries tends to make most redirects irrelevant. The only truly useful redirects are pretty case by case situations to judge. Red link breakage can often be controlled (and QP in general should be better with that anyway, as well as making pages properly in the first place). It's a good reason, but perhaps not big enough to matter. Meanwhile from a housekeeping perspective an excess of redirects provides very little up to no real daily use, while backlogging the special pages for housekeeping - especially when pages are changed or removed since pretty much nobody in QP cares to check for these things. In the end it's simpler to just have far fewer redirects and leave the primary source of traffic to cover the small losses. I don't like to say 'no' redirects because they can be situationally very useful - shortlink acronyms, synonyms - but other times just redundant in local search and other details, like a small case change, small wording change and so on. I would say oppose, but there's enough of a thin line here that I'm just going to let these points stand. Ideally we come up with something a little different as a policy so pages are made right in the first place and housekeeping is better managed, so the only redirects we have are ones strictly needed or that would exist for high traffic page movements (which is where the broken link scenario would actually matter). --Raidarr (talk) 09:18, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * 2) *Additionally, some redirects are indeed worthless. Category especially, functions (templates, some wiki meta) and redirects for very new/low traffic pages typically serve no purpose. --Raidarr (talk) 09:19, 18 October 2021 (UTC)