Help:Redirect

Redirects are unique pages that forward the reader to another destination. They exist to increase the chances of a user successfully navigating to their intended topic, especially when their search query might not be an exact match.

Purposes

Redirects can be useful for covering a wide variety of bases:

• Common and/or easy misspellings or misidentifications
• Full or alternate names for a given subject (for example, Montgomery McQueen, the birth name of our favorite Lightning McQueen, redirects to his page).
• Other feasible ways a reader might attempt to locate a topic. For instance, if someone were looking for the second Planes film but did not know the title, it's not too farfetched to think they might search along the lines of Planes 2 - making it a valuable diversion to the proper target of Planes: Fire & Rescue.

Generally speaking, we hold the mindset of more is better: Unless it is deliberately nonsensical or purposeless, there's no harm in keeping a redirect just in case. As such, please be mindful when flagging a redirect page for deletion.

It should be noted that in cases where one redirect could potentially lead to a number of different targets, the use of a disambiguation page will be preferred. This is essentially a non-functional redirect page, that offers links and brief explanations to help the navigator narrow down what they are searching for.

Syntax

A redirect is created like this:

#REDIRECT [[Name of target]]

This should be placed at the top of an article, with no other text added or left on the page. Redirect pages should be clear of categories, navigation templates, and any additional utilities.

If advantageous, you can even redirect to a particular section on another page, like so:

#REDIRECT [[Name of target#Title of section]]

Particularly useful when linking to a specific subject covered by a broader page.

NOTE: Whenever possible, please link directly to the target page, never intentionally to a redirect page.

See also

• Wikipedia's help page on redirects