Wikipedia:Statistical redirects

One use of redirects is for statistics on how often pages are accessed from certain links. For example, when trying to decide if the COVID-19 pandemic should stay on in the news on the main page, the articles were linked to with tracking redirects such as COVID-19 pandemic*, which would be accessed in no other way except for those links.

Format
Tracking redirects are created as an unlikely modification of the target's title. The exact format for this is undecided.

Redirect categories
The only redirect category templates that should be applied are R from statistical redirect and, if the redirect is in mainspace, R unprintworthy. These should be applied within the Redirect category shell to ensure protection levels are detected and categorized appropriately.

Protection
Tracking redirects should be extended confirmed protected. There is generally no need to edit these, but full protection is usually unnecessary.

Disambiguation
One use for statistical redirects is to record clicks from disambiguation pages to their entries. However, such use may conflict with WP:DABPIPE, either by concealing the title of a linked article with a piped link or by using a redirect in a way that would otherwise be unnecessary.

Alternatives to statistical redirects
The Clickstream datasets list pairs of page titles between which ten or more clicks were recorded within each month, with counts. For example, they reveal how many times a reader moved from Mercury to Mercury (planet) (or lack such a record, indicating that the count is less than ten).