Help:Soft redirect

A soft redirect is a very short page that essentially tells the user to look in another place to obtain the information they were seeking.

The technique is most often used when redirecting users from one wiki to another, where cross-wiki redirects are disabled. On such a wiki, the text of a normal "hard" redirect will be displayed, but will not actually take the user to the other wiki.

How do I create a soft redirect?

Hard redirect example
#redirect [[LasVegas:Food]]

Soft redirect example
See [[LasVegas:Food]]

If a page is relevant to more than one Wikia, it may be best to place the page on just one wiki, and make a soft redirect to it from the other wiki. Advantages of this are that it brings the two projects closer together and prevents duplication of effort.

Why should I soft redirect?

On some wikis, interwiki redirects are disallowed.

Even where such redirects are allowed, normal or "hard" redirects can be undesirable. The page containing the redirect cannot be easily edited, because there's no "Redirected from [title]" message on the destination page. Therefore, there is nothing to click on to take you back to the redirect page, and clicking on a link to the redirect page takes you straight to the redirect's target. The correct URL must be handcrafted to reach the page.

There are also problems when cross-wiki redirects create infinite loops. MediaWiki software does not evaluate double redirects created by internal loops, to prevent these problems, but it is harder to detect loops created between different wikis.

What about soft redirects to categories?

Redirecting to a category now seems to work. In the past, it didn't. Prior, a soft redirect was needed instead.

For example, Wikia:Wikia policies includes a soft redirect to the policies category.

If the category is located within the same wiki, an alternative to redirecting to the category may be to use the DynamicPageList extension to include a list of the category's contents inline in the current page.

The introductory text from the category page may be included as {{Category:whatever}} while the list of items in the category may be included with DynamicPageList codes:

{{Category:whatever}}
<DynamicPageList>
category=whatever
</DynamicPageList>

This approach will not work if the desired content is on another wiki or on an external site. In that case, it is best to use a soft redirect.

See also

• Help:Interwiki links#Redirects
• Soft redirects at Wikipedia, on which this page was based.
• Redirects at MetaWikipedia