Administrivia / Creating New Redirects

aka: Needs A Redirect

Sometimes, the most awesome name is not the most intuitive one. One simple solution is to make a redirect from the intuitive name to the awesome name. If you've never created a redirect before, the process can seem very mysterious. Just follow these instructions!

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STOP! Do not create redirects (or pages) for the following:

• Misspellings: "AntiVillian" to Anti-Villain
• Abbreviations: "WoT" to The Wheel of Time ^note This is acceptable only if it is an Officially Shortened Title.
• Accidental Wiki Words, caused by all-caps followed by either numbers or lowercase letters ("MP3", "RPGs", "NPCs"); use the [=NotAWikiWord=] markup to prevent linking these.
• Specific examples: "KMF" to Humongous Mecha
• Plurals: Regular plurals can be linked by surrounding the singular term with curly braces and adding the "s": {{Game Breaker}}s, for example, becomes Game Breakers. (Which should come naturally to Wikipedia Syntaxers.) Irregular pluralization can sometimes be worked around, "{{Compan|y}}ies" for example. Exceptions can be made for when it can't ("Men" for "Man") or plurals within the name (Bosses in Mook Clothing for Boss in Mook Clothing).^Exception Pages on the Ambiguity Index that also fall under One-Word Title may have plural redirects to the disambiguation page.
• Trope names with definite articles: "TheTsundere" to Tsundere ^Exception Pages on the Ambiguity Index that also fall under One-Word Title may have (in)definite article redirects to the disambiguation page.
• Character names that aren't used as official titles (e.g. JohnMcClane to Die Hard).
• Memes to works that inspired them (e.g. Leekspin to Bleach).
• Inboundless main pages for works, creators, Useful Notes or anything else that needs a different namespace. Wicks for those should be namespaced. (Caveat: sometimes a trope will have a variant name that also happens to be a work title; in this uncommon case, the redirect should point to the trope page, not the work page, and only wicks referring to the work should be namespaced.)
• A page that redirects somewhere else (e.g. Film.The Dark Knight Saga redirects to Film.The Dark Knight Trilogy, so make any new redirects to Trilogy, and not Saga).
• Variant names for tropes that don't improve clarity, but are simply a way to disguise a Pot Hole.
• A redirect in the wrong namespace. For example, a redirect in the Film/ namespace for an animated film (Use Animation/, Anime/, or WesternAnimation/).

Other no-nos:

• Do not create Main/ namespace redirects using the Trope Launch Pad. Use the Locked Pages thread.
• Do not redirect to the Cut List if you want to delete a page. We have a tool for that.
• Similarly, do not redirect to URLs outside the wiki. The wiki software does not allow this.
• Do not make a Circular Redirect. This causes errors and may break older browsers.

Once you are sure your redirect works:

1. If the redirect you want to create is in the Main/ namespace, ask a moderator to do it for you. You can ask them by adding a post to this forum thread.
2. Otherwise, go to the URL you want to redirect — even if it doesn't exist. For instance, if you're creating a redirect from a book's French title to its English title, enter the URL "https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/FrenchTitle". You'll be take to a page that says "We don't have an article named French Title...." Click the "Edit Page" button.
3. Copy and paste [[redirect:TargetPage]] from the Text-Formatting Rules page (or here), replacing "TargetPage" with the name of the page you'd like to redirect to. Don't put a space after the colon! [[redirect:TargetPage]] will work, but [[redirect: TargetPage]] (note the space) won't.
   • If the target page is in a namespace, format the redirect like this: [[redirect:Anime/AnimeShow]], even if the source page is in the same namespace.
   • Sometimes the redirect will not work because the target page is not recognized as a WikiWord, in that case add curly braces as for an internal link, e.g. [[redirect:Anime/{{Title}}]]
   • When changing the old page to a redirect, after moving the original content, please remove everything but the redirect code. Otherwise the old content can cause problems when tropes are renamed or works have their namespacing changed, and create "ghost" wicks that take extra effort to change.
4. Save your redirect page. You should be presented with the target page followed by "aka:" and the redirect title just under the target title.
5. Celebrate!

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