Wikipedia:Category redirects that should be kept

This page contains suggested guidance about keeping soft-redirected pages for categories.

For basic information on this topic, see WP:CATRED. This topic is not to be confused with WP:Categorizing redirects.

Why category redirects are costly

Links to regular redirects are WP:NOTBROKEN: click on the link and you are automatically redirected to its target. However, links to category redirects are broken and need to be fixed. Placing a page into a category redirect makes it show up in the category redirect—not its target—until a bot comes along and fixes the link.

While placing a page in a category redirect is not a big problem, it is a problem. There are plenty of helpful uses of category redirects, but category redirects are not as cheap as regular redirects.

Alternative treatments of category redirects

Category redirects are usually created and left behind after a category is renamed. This happens whether the category is processed by a bot or a human editor.

There are three possible courses of action concerning these redirects:

• Delete. Many such redirects are unlikely to be helpful to editors in the future, so they should be deleted. These include:
  • cases where the original name was mis-spelled or poorly chosen
  • redirects from a different capitalisation.
• Convert to a category disambiguation page. If the category was renamed because it is ambiguous, and categories exist for two or more meanings, then create a category disambiguation page at the old name, using {{category disambiguation}}.

  Note that we usually only do this at an unused category name which is ambiguous, e.g. Category:Lewis. If an ambiguous name is used for an active category because it is clearly the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC, and there are only 1 or 2 others, then use a hatnote like the one at Category:Lewes. For longer lists, we can also create pages such as Category:Bedford (disambiguation).

  After converting a category page, note that its category talk page may still have a hard redirect to the renamed category talk page; replace this with {{WikiProject Disambiguation}}.

• Keep where the category redirect might be useful.

Category redirects that might be useful

The following sets out various cases where it is useful to keep category redirects.

• ASCII to diacritics (etc), as people are highly liable to re-use the versions of names that can be typed using a standard keyboard. In particular, we keep redirects from names with hyphens to names that require a dash (according to the guidance in WP:DASH), such as date ranges.
• Alternative spellings and WP:ENGVAR, especially "organisations"/"organizations".
• Alternative WP:DATERANGE formats that editors might well try to use.
• Categories for objects which had other names in the recent past, if there are many items in the category and there is a chance that someone could use a past name.

  E.g. football team players under previous club names. The same applies to players of other sports, and team managers and if there is a potentially large population for the category.

• Generally, categories where the first part of the new name is different from the old name, because the first part is what counts in the search bar.
• Generally, names that editors might try to use again, and which will help editors to find the current name, e.g. Roman Catholic → Catholic, Bolton → Metropolitan Borough of Bolton.

  Consider whether the redirect will be helpful for editors using WP:HotCat, which autofills depending on the what has been typed so far.

  So for e.g. Category:People from the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, editors are going to try "People from Bolton", so keep "People from Bolton (district)" or "People from Bolton (borough)" – but not both, because one of those would be sufficient.

• Redirects from other category pages that are not easily fixed, e.g. year categories for a country that has changed its name.

  Specialised navigation templates can be built for such cases, e.g. those in Category:20th-century establishments templates by country, but in many cases it is probably not worth the effort, and category redirects provide a sufficient work-around.

  The template {{category series navigation}} now makes use of category redirect pages to provide navigation links straddling changes of name. Such redirects should be tagged with {{R from category navigation}} so that editors will not delete them unwittingly.

• Redirects from category names that are generated by templates and where it is easier to use {{resolve category redirect}} than to tinker with the template or to amend the parameters on all the pages concerned. Include the rcat template {{R from template-generated category}}.

  For example, Category:Washington, D.C. articles missing geocoordinate data is generated by {{coord missing}} with the parameter "Washington, D.C." but the target category name has an extra comma which is not generated by the template.

  {{R from fictional character}} and related templates are also able to resolve category redirects.

  Again, such category redirects should be tagged with {{R from category navigation}} so that editors will not delete them unwittingly.

• Cases where the standard category naming patterns may not be intuitively understood. For example, people from countries where there is no demonym follow the pattern "People from X", including occupations e.g. "Artists from X", but we use "of" rather than "from" for national office-holders, military personnel and nobility. In those cases, leave a redirect at the page name that includes "from".
• Redirects where there are many incoming links (for instance, from talk or CFD pages), or where such discussions may have continuing importance. In these cases, redirects will help interested editors to trace the precedent discussions.
• Redirects from category merges where both pages have significant page history, which might be worth keeping for attribution.
• Redirects from category merges where other-language Wikipedias are still using both categories. In these cases, keeping the redirect may help another editor or a future bot-process to trace and merge categories in the other Wikipedias. {{Category redirect}} automatically categorizes these in Category:Soft redirects connected to a Wikidata item and displays an appropriate message.

See also

• Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion#Reasons for not deleting