Wikipedia:WikiProject Redirect/Style guide

This is a style guide for redirects in the English Wikipedia. The ultimate goal of the guide is to have every redirect categorised in a standard format, as well as to have every main-namespace (article) redirect categorised as either printworthy or unprintworthy. Printworthiness becomes important when a printed edition of Wikipedia is published, for example in CD-ROM format. For more information, see the documentation on the R printworthy and R unprintworthy template pages and Printability.

Redirect statements, which should start at the beginning of the first line of the redirect source, should follow one of these formats: #REDIRECT Target article name #REDIRECT Target article name Replace "target article name" with the name of the article that is the desired target (including an optional anchor, if required). The target should be the exact name of the target, including correct casing, otherwise it may create a double redirect, a broken link, or some other problem. Use the same casing for the first character of the target as the target page, although this will not affect the working of the redirect. Although wikisyntax allows spaces and underscores to be used interchangeably, to avoid confusion and for easier maintenance, use spaces and underscores exactly as they are used in the target page title and anchor.

The redirect statement should appear all on one line or it will not work properly. Other elements such as redirect templates may appear after the redirect statement, however.

Other common elements
In addition to the redirect statement itself, the source for a redirect may contain other elements such as redirect templates, the optional DEFAULTSORT tag, redirect categories, and interwiki links (and rfd if the redirect is nominated for discussion or db if speedy deletion is required).

Adding redirect templates
should be added with (rcats) and not as regular (linked) categories. There is no specific order required, so this is left up to editors. Do not substitute redirect templates, nor should they ever be used on soft redirects. Redirect templates can be added in two ways: individually or grouped.

Individually
Individual redirect templates can appear anywhere after the redirect statement itself. Generally however they are added before any categories.


 * 1) REDIRECT Target article name

Grouping template
Alternatively, redirect templates can be added with the Redirect category shell. If the redirect does not seem to fit into any redirect categories, add without any parameters and the redirect will be sorted to. If some rcats are known, they can be added by leaving the first parameter blank / empty (by typing two pipe characters  instead of one after the word "shell" below), and monitors of the Misc. category will know to come and check the redirect.


 * 1) REDIRECT Target article name

If a blank line is left between the shell template and the DEFAULTSORT magic word, then unnecessary whitespace is introduced when the edit is saved. Readability for editors is still acceptable when DEFAULTSORT is placed on the first new line after the Redirect category shell.

A comparison of the two styles may be found on any redirect template page and at Template:Redirect category shell/Comparison.

Hidden categories
Most of the categories populated by redirect category templates (Rcats) are hidden categories. Hidden cats cannot be seen by viewers who are not logged in, nor by editors who have not set their preferences to view hidden cats. So if you have tagged a redirect with an Rcat and saved the redirect, but you cannot see the category, the first thing to check is if you have set your preferences to view hidden cats: You may need to purge your browser cache to ensure that you can see hidden cats in the future.
 * 1) Go to
 * 2) Scroll down to 
 * 3) Check the box 
 * 4) Click

File redirects
When rcats are used to categorize image-file redirects, the category(ies) may not appear on the redirect page after saving even if preferences are set to view hidden cats. Yet the image-file redirect will still populate the category(ies). For example, in at the bottom of the page under section heading Media in category "Redirects from moves", a file redirect has been correctly categorized, and yet the categories from  may not appear on  file page. Hidden categories on image-file redirects can also be detected by clicking on "Page information" in the Tools list, usually in the left-margin sidebar.