Help:Redirects

For sitelinks to Wikimedia redirect pages, see Help:Sitelinks#Linking to Wikimedia site pages.

It is proposed that this informational page become a policy or guideline. Please see the discussion on its talk page or the project chat.
The following is a proposed Wikidata policy or guideline. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption.

This page in a nutshell: Redirects are used to provide stable identifiers. They should not be deleted; links to them are cleaned up automatically. Use merge tools to create them.

Redirects in Wikidata are basically the same as redirects of normal wiki pages. However, they have a slightly different meaning and intention. The main reason why we need redirects is because we want to provide stable identifiers.

Creating redirects

Redirects are generally created when using tools to merge items. Please use these whenever possible.

Redirects could also be created using Special:RedirectEntity or the 'wbcreateredirect' api module.

Use cases

Redirects usually get created when two items are merged. This will happen when some user recognizes that they describe the same subject. If one item gets merged into another one, this item is useless and presumably can be deleted. However, there might still be references to this item's id, either from within Wikidata or even from other webpages. Therefore, we need a way to tell them that the same concept can now be found in the other item. This is what redirects do.

For instance, similar to Wikipedia when en:Haïti redirects to en:Haiti, Category:1911 in Morocco (Q18511155) redirects to Category:1911 in Morocco (Q9404406) (because some time in the past, two items had been created to represent the same concept, and they were merged, leaving a redirect).

Rules for redirecting

Redirecting is the preferred result of solving real duplicates after they got merged, where due to some error one or more site links are found in one or more items. Administrators should not delete one item and leave the other, but turn one into a redirect to the other. Under no circumstances should redirects be deleted or repurposed for another object. Deleting them would mean invalidating possible references to this concept and Wikidata would lose a lot of its reliability.

Links to redirects

If a merged item is used as the value of statements on other items, those statements will not immediately be switched to use the new item (and should not be edited in that way by regular users). This allows a merge to be easily reverted if it was done in error. However, within a few days there is a bot running on Wikidata (currently KrBot) that will replace the item values so they are directly linked, rather than indirectly through the redirect.

Double redirects

Double redirects happen when an item is merged into a second item, and that item is then merged into a third item: the first item is then a double redirect (redirecting to the second item, which is itself a redirect). Like for links to redirects, there is a bot (currently Revibot) which cleans up these double redirects after a while by changing the first item to directly redirect to the third.

Redirects on Wikidata Query Service

owl:sameAs is used for redirects on Wikidata Query Service. Triple for the sample mentioned above is wd:Q18511155 owl:sameAs wd:Q9404406

To visually identify redirects

To visually recognize links to redirect pages without having to follow the link, copy and paste .mw-redirect { color: #006633;} .mw-redirect:visited { color: #009900;} .mw-redirect:hover { color: #990000;} .mw-redirect:active { color: #990000;} in your css page. All redirects will be green, the same way that red links quickly show that they target a deleted page.