User:Extreme Unction/Header

Redirects for deletion (RfD) is the place where Wikipedians decide what should be done with problematic redirects. Items sent here usually stay listed for a week or so. Then they are either deleted by an administrator, kept, or retargeted.

Note: If all you want to do is replace a currently existing redirect with an actual article, you do not need to list it here. Turning redirects into fleshed-out encyclopedic articles is wholly encouraged at Wikipedia. Be bold.

Before you list a redirect for deletion...
...please familiarize yourself with the following:


 * Redirect &mdash; our general policy on what redirects are, why they exist, and how they are used.
 * Criteria for speedy deletion &mdash; our policy on which pages can be deleted without discussion. The "General" and "Redirects" section apply here.
 * Deletion policy &mdash; our deletion policy that describes how we delete things by consensus
 * Guide to deletion &mdash; whose guidelines on discussion format and shorthands also apply here

The Guiding Principles of RfD

 * The purpose of a good redirect is to eliminate the possibility that an average user will wind up staring blankly at a "Search results 1-10 out of 378" search page instead of the article they were looking for. If someone could plausibly type in the redirect's name when searching for the target article, it's a good redirect.
 * Redirects are cheap. Redirects take up minimal disk space and use very little bandwidth.  Thus, it doesn't really hurt things much if there are a few of them scattered around.
 * The default result of any RFD nomination is delete. This makes RFD different from all the other various deletion discussion pages aside from Images and media for deletion.  Thus, a nomination made in good faith and in accordance with RfD policy will be deleted, even if there is no discussion surrounding that nomination.
 * Nominations made in contravention of Redirect will be speedily kept.
 * RfD is not the place to resolve editorial disputes. If you think a redirect should be targetted at a different article, discuss it on the talk pages of the current target article and/or the proposed target article.

When should we delete a redirect?
See also: Policy on which redirects can be deleted immediately, and /Precedents for precedents that are followed with regards to redirects.

How to list a redirect for deletion
To list a redirect for deletion, follow this two-step process:

Notes for admins closing RfD nominations

 * When you delete an entry from this page, please make sure to put in the edit summary for that deletion a message indicating i) the name of the removed entry, and ii) the date it was placed here (i.e. the header it was listed under). This makes it easy for people looking through the page history to find when a particular request was dealt with; since this page gets so much traffic it can otherwise be a lengthy binary search to track something down.
 * Per policy, pages need to stay here for at least a week before they are deleted, unless they fall under one of the general criteria for speedy deletion, or are one of the criteria for speedy deletion of a redirect.
 * Note: Sometimes a redirect has history, and the history is significant - i.e. contains information about the addition of text. (This often happens because someone did a cut-and-paste "move", instead of using the "Move this page" button.) Never simply delete the redirect page, which we need to keep for copyright reasons. There are two ways to deal with such pages.
 * For cut-and-paste moves, the "right" way to handle them is to merge the history into the appropriate page, using the procedure outlined here. This is a procedure fraught with peril, however, and on rare occasions doesn't work correctly. Once done, it cannot be undone without a lot of exceptionally tedious gruntwork. So don't pick this option unless it's definitely the right one for the case at hand.
 * Another option, useful for pages which were merged (for example), is for redirect pages with significant history to be archived into a talk namespace, and a link to them put into an article's talk page.
 * If you delete a redirect, don't forget to delete the accompanying talk page, if applicable.
 * When you remove an entry from this page because people decided to keep it, don't forget to remove the tag from the page (alas, this has to be done manually). It's worth periodically checking either here and here to see if any pages missed this step. Checking either of these regularly has the side-benefit of finding pages where people added the  tag to the page, but didn't realize they needed to edit RfD as well.
 * Once you've resolved an issue, please archive the nomination and any applicable discussion in the RFD archives.

Other deletion discussion areas

 * Speedy deletions
 * Copyright problems for text (in any namespace) that violates our Copyright policy
 * Articles for deletion for articles in the main namespace
 * Templates for deletion for templates
 * Categories for deletion for categories
 * Stub types for deletion for stub tags and categories (combined)
 * Images and media for deletion for images and other uploaded media files
 * Miscellany for deletion for everything else

Contested decisions from any of the deletion discussion pages (including this one) may be discussed at Deletion review.