User:Emmette Hernandez Coleman/Deleting redirects to facilitate searching
 | This is an essay on the deletion policy. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Although essay this is in my user-space, please feel free to edit it. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk)
It's often helpful to think of deleting a redirect as re-targeting it to search page. If you delete a redirect, then when our readers look it up in the search box, they end up at the search page.
Limitations
When a redirect is deleted, you don't always end up at a search page:
- If you follow an internal link, The Terrible Towers, you arrive at the editing interface to create an article (with a note that the title has been previously deleted).
- If you arrive at the former redirect's url (e.g. a link from an external site, entering the URL directly, bookmarks, some external search methods), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terrible_Towers, then you get the note that the title has been previously deleted above the "Wikipedia doesn't have an article with this exact title" message, inviting you to search. (MediaWiki:Noarticletext)
- If you arrive by using the internal search engine [1] or some external search tools (e.g. the Firefox search shortcut from the URL bar [2]) you get the search page.
People use all these methods and more to search and navigate Wikipedia so the user experience is unpredictable.