Help:Redirects

Redirects are used to forward users from one page name to another. They can be useful if a particular article is referred to by multiple names, or has alternative punctuation, capitalization or spellings.

Creating a redirect

You may start a new page with the name you want to direct from (see Help:Starting a new page). You can also use an existing page that you are making inactive as a page by going to that page and using the "edit" tab at the top. In either case, you will be inserting the following code at the very first text position of the Edit window for the page:

#REDIRECT [[pagename]]

where pagename is the name of the destination page. The word "redirect" is not case-sensitive, but there must be no space before the "#" symbol. Any text before the code will disable the code and prevent a redirect. Any text or regular content code after the redirect code will be ignored (and should be deleted from an existing page). However, to put or keep the current page name listed in a Category, the usual tag for that category is entered or kept on a line after the redirect code entry.

You should use the 'preview' button below the Edit window, or Alt-P, to check that you have entered the correct destination page name. The preview page will not look like the resulting redirect page, it will look like a numbered list, with the destination page in blue:

1. REDIRECT  pagename

If the pagename as you typed it is not a valid page, it will show in red. Until there is a valid destination page, you should not make the redirect.

Viewing a redirect

After making a redirect at a page, you can no longer get to that page by using its name or by any link using that name; and they do not show up in wiki search results, either. However, near the top of the destination page, a notice that you have been forwarded appears, with the source pagename as an active link to it. Click this to get back to the redirected page, showing the large bent arrow symbol and the destination for the redirect.

By doing this, you can do all the things that any wiki page allows. You can go to the associated discussion page to discuss the redirect. You can view the history of the page, including a record of the redirect. You can edit the page if the redirect is wrong, and you can revert to an older version to remove the redirect.

Deleting a redirect

There's generally no need to delete redirects. They do not occupy a significant amount of database space. If a page name is vaguely meaningful, there's no harm (and some benefit) in having it as a redirect to the more relevant or current page.

If you do need to delete a redirect, e.g. if the page name is offensive, or you wish to discourage people from referring to a concept by that name, then you simply go to the redirect page as mentioned above, and follow the procedures at Help:Deleting a page.

Double redirects

A double redirect is a page redirecting to a page which is itself a redirect, and it will not work. Instead, people will be presented with a view of the next redirect page. This is a deliberate restriction, partly to prevent infinite loops, and partly to keep things simple.

However, you could look out for double redirects and eliminate them, by changing them to be 1-step redirects instead. You are most likely to need to do this after a significant page move. Use the "what links here" toolbox link to find double redirects to a particular page, or use Special:DoubleRedirects to find them throughout the whole wiki.

A redirect to a page in the category namespace

To prevent a page that redirects to a category from appearing in the category, precede the word "Category" with a colon:

#REDIRECT [[:Category:Glossary]]

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Syntax

{{Languages|PageName}}

• PageName (optional) - the name of the page to display language links for. If omitted then the English version of the current page is used. This parameter can normally be omitted, as it is only required if you want to link to a page other than the one you place the template on, which is very uncommon. If this parameter is used on a sub-page make sure you supply the root name, not the full page name (e.g. on MediaWiki/fr you would need to use {{Languages|MediaWiki}} and not {{Languages|MediaWiki/fr}}).

Usage

The template should only be placed on pages that exist in more than one language, and it should be placed in the same location on each translation of the page.

The English version of a page is always the main version, with all other languages as sub-pages, named using the appropriate language code (see below).

For example, on the Main Page you would include the text {{Languages}}, both on Main Page itself, and on each of its language sub-pages. The template automatically creates links to any language sub-pages that exist, e.g. Main Page/ja<tt>, <tt>Main Page/fr, and ignores non-existant languages.

See Project:Language policy for further details about translating pages.

Supported languages

This shows you the name of each language's sub-page (using Main Page as an example). Other languages may be added easily as necessary. Please use the appropriate prefix, as used on Wikipedia when adding a new language. Please do not add languages for which no pages exist yet, as this will increase the time needed to include the template without adding any benefit (languages are only displayed to the user when the relevant page exists).

The link on the language names goes to the Wikipedia in that language. If no Wikipedia in your language exists, do not add pages in that language to MediaWiki.org! This wiki is not the place for language advocacy - please go through the correct channels, and once your language has a Wikipedia then please return to add content here.

Page Name	Language
Main Page	English
Main Page/af	Afrikaans
Main Page/ar	Arabic
Main Page/az	Azerbaijani
Main Page/bcc	Southern Balochi
Main Page/bg	Bulgarian
Main Page/br	Breton
Main Page/ca	Catalan
Main Page/cs	Czech
Main Page/da	Danish
Main Page/de	German
Main Page/el	Greek
Main Page/es	Spanish
Main Page/fa	Persian
Main Page/fi	Finnish
Main Page/fr	French
Main Page/gl	Galician
Main Page/gu	Gujarati
Main Page/he	Hebrew
Main Page/hu	Hungarian
Main Page/id	Indonesian
Main Page/it	Italian
Main Page/ja	Japanese
Main Page/ka	Georgian
Main Page/ko	Korean
Main Page/ksh	Kölsch
Main Page/ml	Malayalam
Main Page/mr	Marathi
Main Page/ms	Malay
Main Page/nl	Nederlands
Main Page/no	Norwegian
Main Page/oc	Occitan
Main Page/pl	Polish
Main Page/pt	Portugese
Main Page/pt-br	Brazilian Portuguese
Main Page/ro	Romanian
Main Page/ru	Russian
Main Page/si	Sinhalese
Main Page/sk	Slovak
Main Page/sq	Albanian
Main Page/sr	Serbian
Main Page/sv	Swedish
Main Page/ta	Tamil
Main Page/th	Thai
Main Page/tr	Turkish
Main Page/uk	Ukrainian
Main Page/vi	Vietnamese
Main Page/yue	Cantonese
Main Page/zh	Chinese
Main Page/zh-hans	Chinese (Simplified)
Main Page/zh-hant	Chinese (Traditional)
Main Page/zh-tw	Chinese (Taiwan)

Example

Here is how the language bar looks on the MediaWiki page: