Wikipedia:Redirects in languages other than English
 | This is an explanatory essay about the WP:Redirect § When should we delete a redirect? guideline. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Redirects from other languages should generally be avoided unless a well-grounded rationale can be provided for their inclusion. |
This guideline for deleting redirects states that redirects in languages other than English that point to articles not directly related to that language or a culture associated with that language (affinity) should generally not be kept. This page lays out good and bad examples, and explains the possible reasons for deletion.
Examples
Examples of appropriate non-English redirects include:
- Original or official names of people, places, institutions, publications or products (such as Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Banco Central do Brasil, Coalición Cívica, 千と千尋の神隠し, or 삼성)
- Manifestations of culture with special significance in areas where that language is spoken (such as Kecap manis)
- Apparently foreign words which are used as the English variant word in some forms of English (such as serviette (French for napkin), which is the common term used in several varieties of English)
- Redirects that support administrative functions such as the merger or movement of content. (such as Aap Ka Himesh, Abax or Affenbrot)
Examples of inappropriate non-English redirects include:
- Common words or concepts (such as bodem (Dutch for soil), computadora/ordenador (Spanish for computer), blyant (Danish for pencil), आग (Hindi for fire), ゴールド (Japanese for gold), ប្រាក់ (Khmer for silver), or 테이블 (Korean for table))
- Direct translations where the native/original form of the title is in English (or a language other than the language of the redirect's title) (such as Non è un paese per vecchi (Italian for No Country for Old Men), עוגיפלצת (Hebrew for Cookie Monster), ラウドハウス (Japanese for The Loud House), 生命之书 (Simplified Chinese for The Book of Life), or 중력 폭포 (Korean for Gravity Falls))
Examples of redirects that may have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis include:
- Topics for which a non-English title is in common use even if that is not the common English, the official or the original name (such as Malines (French for Mechelen))
Rationale
This wiki serves English speakers. Having a large number of unrelated redirects in other languages presents problems for both our readers and editors.
A problem with non-English redirects concerns false friends, where the same spelling may mean different things depending on the language. The word dam has meanings across different languages including 'stable', 'pond', 'checkers', and 'price'. If English did not have the word dam, none of these would belong at Dam (disambiguation), and therefore none would be appropriate as a redirect target.
In addition, the existence of redirects from other languages gives readers the impression that a page exists in their native language. This is not always the case. Due to how third-party search engines work, readers could be forwarded to the English Wikipedia without any reference to a page in their native language. This is more likely to happen if the page does not exist in the Wikipedia of the redirect's language, and can thus hinder the creation of an article or redirect for the subject in the Wikipedia of the redirect's language.
The presence of non-English language redirects creates the false impression that you can navigate the English Wikipedia in another language. If, for example, we had a redirect from Bodem (Dutch) to soil, a Dutch speaker might get the impression that our articles generally have Dutch redirects. This could be problematic if that reader searched for Klimaatverandering and found nothing, leading them to assume that the English Wikipedia had no article for climate change. This problem can also be compounded with that of multiple meanings for the same word across multiple languages: A German-speaking reader with low English proficiency misled into thinking that English Wikipedia supports redirects from German words might think that Gift is about poison. Different languages may also have different primary targets for the same phrase, causing confusion if we were to try to support cross-language redirects for a language's entire vocabulary. For instance, stormur means 'storm' in Icelandic, but a reader searching for that string on English Wikipedia is much more likely to be looking for the song Sigur Rós Stormur; had we preemptively redirected Stormur to Storm, we would have only inconvenienced such readers.
The presence of arbitrary non-English redirects can also encourage editors to try to create new articles in their language of choice, which will either need to be deleted or moved to another project.
Finally, the only language we can rely on our editors speaking is English. Often it requires a strong working knowledge of a language to evaluate and understand redirects – for example, being able to identify that a Chinese redirect is using the wrong character, or a Romanian redirect has an incorrect diacritical mark that looks almost identical to the correct one. Redirects also require maintenance, as they may be retargeted, or their targets get moved or merged. We rely on editors to watch for errors on redirects, which is harder for those in other languages.