Wikivoyage talk:How to redirect a page

How to create a redirect for a page that does not yet exist

How do you create a redirect for a page that does not yet exist? I would like to set up some redirects from German names to the accepted English names of towns, and from common misspellings (without umlauts) to the correctly named pages (e.g. Köln --> Cologne; Bodensee --> Lake Constance; München --> Munich etc.). (WT-en) Brendio 17:20, 16 Jan 2006 (EST)

To clarify, I realise that one way is to create link from another page, and then create the page from there, and then delete that link afterwards, but is there an easier/simpler way to achieve this? (WT-en) Brendio 17:21, 16 Jan 2006 (EST)

Nope. The only way to make new pages is to make links to them. You can do it on, say, your user page, or a user sub page (User:(WT-en) Brendio/Redirects, say), or on the Project:Graffiti wall. --(WT-en) Evan 17:45, 16 Jan 2006 (EST)

Thanks for the quick reply.(WT-en) Brendio 17:56, 16 Jan 2006 (EST)

Yes. I make new pages (and or Redirects) this way (But note that Evan is more knowledgeable about Wikivoyage than I; my way below may be flawed in same way. --(WT-en) Rogerhc 6 March 2006):

1. Type into your browser's location bar the URL to the page you want to create, for example: http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Noodletown and go to it (You get to a pages that says there is no content on this page yet)
2. Click the Edit tab on that page and put whatever you like in the page, #REDIRECT[[Pastatown]] for example if you want it to be a redirect, and click Save.

Undo a redirect

Swept in from the pub

Right now Whidbey Island redirects to North Sound, but there is no reason that Whidbey Island shouldn't have its own article. How does one go about undoing a redirect? --Lumpytrout (talk) 13:47, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

After follow the redirect, there is a message that says "redirected from xxxx". Just click on the xxxx and then edit the page, remove the redirect, and start an article there. Texugo (talk) 13:51, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

thanks, so simple yet so frustrating. --Lumpytrout (talk) 14:08, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Redirects for spelling mistakes?

Swept in from the pub

I noticed that a redirect for Negeria to 'Nigeria' was created, but as far as I can tell this is not an accepted alternative name for Nigeria.

Wikivoyage:How_to_redirect_a_page does not seem to specify misspellings as a reason for redirecting. I understand that very obvious misspellings are sometimes used on WV as redirects.

My question is what/where is the guidance for creating a redirect with a potential wrong spelling? If Negeria is acceptable, would Niigerea also be acceptable? --Andrewssi2 (talk) 20:42, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, that looked strange to me, too. Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:34, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Not least because the first five letters are the German version of "the n-word"... Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:54, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Time for a Vfd, or should we just speedily delete it without further review? Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:22, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Deletion was my thought. I hesitated because I couldn't think where the policy around this / previous consensus would be located. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 23:45, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

I'll do a Vfd. Ikan Kekek (talk) 02:18, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Started. Ikan Kekek (talk) 02:23, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

There are very good reasons why redirects for misspellings are widely used throughout the Wikimedia projects. First, while the search engine has greatly improved, it still does not always get you to where you want to go if you accidentally change a single letter in a word. Second, redirects are extremely tiny in terms of space, and using them is of no technical or financial concern in practice - especially for small projects like WV. Any action taken on an established redirect (deleting, discussing etc.) costs far more space and time than just leaving it be (which doesn't mean discussing it is in any way problematic, just that it's not useful when anyone is doing so because they are thinking about space). Third, determining the likeliness of a spelling mistake is not straightforward. The English language versions of the projects are used by huge numbers of non-native speakers. The spelling mistakes they make are often connected to their own native language and on their accents when they speak English. I do establish misspelling redirects here too, quite regularly.

Let me give an example. Gorinchem is a city in the Netherlands. That name is often pronounced as Gorkum, especially in the own region, which is now a more or less accepted unofficial but common alternative. That should get a redirect. Even those, however, who do not say Gorkum, will say Gorichem - without the "N". My uneducated guess would be that at least 5% of Dutch people would misspell it - but it could be 4 times as many too. It's simply a spelling mistake based on local pronunciation - but as an English speaker just looking at the article, leaving a letter out may seem as unlikely as typing one double. If you put Gorichem in our search engine however, you get nothing. I would therefore urge reluctance to speedy deleting redirects, and googling to determine likeliness of the mistake. It can also help to have a look at the statistics of the (often already existing) redirect on the English Wikipedia. Looking at the stats for "Negeria" there, it seems that page gets about 35 hits per month.. JuliasTravels (talk) 12:51, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Redirects are cheap If we have a lot of them which serve some conceivable function, then there's no harm in keeping them around. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 14:56, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Maybe "Negeria" is a very common mistake made by speakers of language X? Maybe a high-traffic twitter account did a typo when linking to Wikivoyage, and the redirect is the only way to get that traffic? Redirects are very cheap, deleting them is mostly a waste of time and can actually be counter-productive. Cheers! Syced (talk) 08:54, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Redirects for real places with no content

Swept in from the pub

I'd like to get some of your thoughts about another redirect question. We have the established policy that "we don't delete real places", which means that skeletons with (almost) no content often get redirected to the "nearest town with an article". For tiny towns that are real, but probably don't warrant an article of their own and have a neighbouring town with an article; that's fine. In practice however, it sometimes also means we redirect skeletons on mid-sized towns that could be developed into articles, to towns not all that close and (more importantly), to articles that have no actual information on the redirected destination. I wonder if we should re-evaluate that practice. I wonder, if it's not a disservice to our users when we send them to an article with no information about the destination they searched for. I also wonder, if it might discourage actually creating that article, as such redirects are a bit confusing to new editors. What do you think? JuliasTravels (talk) 15:20, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Nearby towns If I were traveling to one town and got a redirect to a different town that I wasn't traveling to, that would probably not help me but if I were redirected to a larger subdivision that includes the town where I am traveling, then I think that would be useful. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:23, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

If there is an article for an actual city/town without content, leaving it alone is probably the best option, especially if you don't know the town/area (although a lot of people who claim to know areas can still be biased in saying that a place has "nothing" in it). I definitely don't want to fall into the pitfalls that many Wikipedia redirects have, which are as you say; linked to unrelated articles with no information about the redirect topic. It's annoying and frustrating to the user (in our case the traveler). I think in general, leaving outlines and stubs is often the best solution. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 17:51, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

I made the point elsewhere that if a traveler sees an empty article for Town X then they will assume WV has nothing to say about the destination and reflects poorly on Wikivoyage as a whole. If we redirect to the nearest town or region above, then at least we can present some relevant content that they could use on their travel to that destination. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 19:59, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Paper guides often mention some place and then only use a few lines to describe it. We are of course not paper, but there are legitimately places about which we could say something but not enough for a whole article... I always thought that's what the "go next" section was for... Of course the value judgment which type of place belongs in which category is a hard one, especially as we are a wiki and not one company with a deadline by which the printing press has to be fed... Hobbitschuster (talk) 20:27, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

I agree with JuliasTravels on this. I hear what Andrewssi2 says that empty articles look like WV has nothing to say, and maybe it does reflect poorly (OTOH, it’s a wiki so I’m not expecting a complete guide to everything — it’s the nature of a wiki). I’m just not sure how redirecting a destination really helps in most cases — my experience (like JuliasTravels) is the redirected destination usually doesn’t have content on the original destination either. So, redirect or skeleton, it becomes obvious WV has nothing to say on the topic. Our bigger problem is lack of content, and I think we’re more likely to get additional content by leaving empty (or nearly empty) guides alone. It seems more intuitive that content relating to City X goes in an article for City X as opposed to City Y, the closest place with an article. If it’s obvious the destination is a speck in the wall that won’t support an article, a redirect to the “nearest town with an article” seems reasonable. But if there’s any doubt, I think we should let the article be.

@ Hobbitschuster - I find the Nearby section handy in those situations — see the description in the city article template. -Shaundd (talk) 22:33, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

I think I agree with this. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:42, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

My core concern is around quality and manageability. It does seem that there is a pattern for anonymous users to create a skeleton destination and then either take a modicum of information from Wikipedia to fill it (without attribution) or abandon it completely. Given that there are hundreds of thousands of potential destinations in the world, would a bulk creation of skeleton articles be acceptable to this community?

If that is the direction that Wikivoyage by consensus wants to go then I won't try and hold it back. I would just ask that at the very least the 'Can you sleep there?' test remains. Andrewssi2 (talk) 23:14, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Oh sure - I'm not necessarily suggesting we should keep completely empty skeletons - just that redirecting is not always a good idea. The discussion that arose on the vfd page is that we should somehow tag new empty skeletons, in order to allow creators (and other interested users) some time to work on them before they get redirected. If we want to discourage creation of such articles but do not want to merge, we can also agree to delete them. It's easy enough for any user to spend 10 minutes to add some info, which would mean the article would just stay. Again, this would not apply to destinations that don't meet our article criteria to start with. If we do redirect, we should make sure that there is some mention of the redirected article. JuliasTravels (talk) 11:22, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Andrewssi2: Bulk creation of skeleton articles is not acceptable. I believe that's the one case in which we do actually delete real places, specifically to discourage bulk creation. At least with individual creation, we know someone, somewhere thought a place was worthy of an article. Powers ^(talk) 02:53, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

I actually believe it is better to redirect to the superior-level region than a "nearby town". A nearby town is a different location, if I want to go to Dusseldorf, a guide to Cologne won't be of much help. If there is any information on the location worth keeping but not enough to warrant an article, I'd move it to said superior region, perhaps leave a redlink for somebody to come round and develop it into a guide.

I am not in favour of leaving skeletons just in case somebody edits them, because often such edits are nominal, and still leave the skeleton in skeletal state. Either there is enough information and passion about the destination for at least an outline guide, or it is simply an inhabited place, however large, of little touristic interest, of which there are many. I would rather have a nicely-rounded guide to a region which, following examples of print guides, briefly describe some minor locations in the regional article, than a laundry list of near-empty shells that is only more difficult and frustrating to navigate. What we face is also often a whole hierarchy of content-less articles created in the misguided conviction that somehow it is helping the traveller to mention every destination and create more regional levels. PrinceGloria (talk) 07:21, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

(indent) That is anti-wiki, PrinceGloria. There are many articles about places with tons of great attractions that are still redlinks in our guides (or without mention/links at all), so using how long an article has been sitting without editing as an indicator of whether or not it should exist is dangerous. It seems you're suggesting we should only accept articles that are at usable or higher and redirect everything else, but that's not the Wiki way and that would make WV quite an awful guide. I understand what you're saying about mass creation of contentless articles, but those should be deleted as Powers stated. Redirecting real places should be avoided whenever possible, because the redirects are essentially a way to ensure that a destination will never get an article or content added about it, and that's not something we should take lightly. I know a lot of people who swear that certain destinations have "nothing to do" and I've managed to find enough there for at least a good daytrip, and many of our editors have not even been to the country in which the location they're judging is located, let alone visiting the city personally. The shortcomings of our guides are the fault of ourselves more than the destinations. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 11:30, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

I completely accept that with a certain 'one horse town' some people will find nothing to do and some will in fact find lots of interesting things. With the example of Japan I would suggest that not every village with a place to sleep need be created, but could redirect to a rural district (gun) instead. That Rural district would contain a good deal of interesting information relating to a collection of villages and I believe that would serve the traveler better. If a village had enough for a standalone article then it could change from a redirect to a full article. (I do something similar in South Korea where an article on a rural County makes more sense than 5 fairly empty articles for 5 settlements) Andrewssi2 (talk) 11:57, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

I think we all agree but have different destinations in mind based on our experience and editing patterns. I also agree with Andrew, after crossing a certain threshold of relevance using a sort of destination-region might make more sense than awarding every administratively or nominally separate location with often a single POI an article just out of reverence. I would rather have a region rife for breaking up into individual articles as it bursts with content eventually than a multilevel empty skeleton which is hard to navigate for the traveller - which is the way print guides deal with it as well. PrinceGloria (talk) 13:14, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

That is assuming that people will add all of those towns' details and sites into the region article, but editors don't seem to do that in practice. Actually, doing that can feel as if one is going against policy, since we do generally tag content that is city-specific to be moved out of regional articles. While I agree that navigation is difficult with too many useless links (especially if an equally useless hierarchy article has been created to contain them), but it's equally frustrating for the traveler to be redirected. For the purposes of being comprehensive, I actually think merging from a town article to a larger article is better than creating a redirect first and expecting people to actually put all of the same type of information there. It especially makes the region article awkward to have listings for just one town while having actual links to destinations that we feel can support articles. Perhaps this is the real problem; we have guidelines for this but the results are not as clear or even as welcomed in practice as they are stated. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 15:07, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

There are ways to edit "listing-type" entries into regional articles without running into awkwardness, and in general what I was thinking about were regions rife with one-liner articles created in the misguided belief that this is actually helping the traveller, which can now be absorbed back into the region, as per Andrew's concept above. I've actually done this for a few regions and I think it worked well. PrinceGloria (talk) 22:25, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

I’m not sure what’s being discussed here. If it’s the creation of rural area type of articles that cover a number of small communities and it sits at the bottom of our hierarchy (which is what I think Andrewssi2 and ChubbyWimbus are saying), I think that’s a often a good idea. If we’re talking about taking an existing region and allowing listings in the See, Do, Eat, etc. sections for places we consider too small for an article, my initial reaction is I don’t like it. I have a few concerns but my main one is I think it’s confusing and could lead to more work. I think causal readers and contributors will struggle to understand why some regions have listings and some don’t. I think they will also struggle to understand why, in a region that has listings, listings for some cities are at the region level and other listings are pushed down. Where I’m going is I think the inclusion of listings in a region could result in the region article holding listings from all destinations within the region (even those that already have their own article) and thus more maintenance work. Depending on what other content is in the See, Do, Eat sections, I think it could also give the impression the primary attractions of the region are those small community listings, which is probably not the case. As I said at the start, I'm not sure what exactly is being proposed so I could be misunderstanding this all. PrinceGloria, if you have examples of where you’ve done this, it would be interesting to see them. -Shaundd (talk) 23:22, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't think anything is being proposed as such, just an approach that can be taken to create a workable hierarchy structure for places where it makes sense. In East Asia it is common for authorities to create a 'town' which is actually a collection of small settlements, so that villages A, B and C would identify themselves as being part of a rural district that is often translated and described as a town, even though it contains a great deal of rural area between each village. This works well for Wikivoyage when each village wouldn't make a substantial article by itself.

At the other end of the scale, China actually declares very large areas of countryside containing a few towns as a 'city'. So that aspect doesn't work for Wikivoyage so much.

In my current Australia articles it is a different case again. A small settlement can be over 100km from the nearest other settlement. In this case redirecting to a 'district' also doesn't work. Andrewssi2 (talk) 05:53, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Okay, this discussion went into several directions. My original question was regarding new skeleton articles about places that would deserve an article. Let's forget about the (allegedly) "speck in the wall" articles, as that's a different discussion, and focus on skeleton articles for towns that are interesting enough to have an article (in the future).

A recent example is Newport_(Shropshire). This was created as an empty skeleton, and therefore put on the vfd list. Technically, our current policy states that we do not delete real places, but we also do not like empty skeletons. If I had not expanded the article, it would have been redirected. I was trying to say that this seems like a bad idea. I understand Andrewssi's concerns about Wikivoyage obviously lacking then, but I still believe redirecting does not help the traveller - and therefore becomes even less usable. My suggestion would be that in these cases we either:

1. Expand a bit so the article can stay
2. Leave the skeleton
3. Delete

An alternative option (but completely outside our usual ways) would be some kind of template/message that would say:

Unfortunately, we have no article for Newport (Shropshire) yet

Perhaps you are interested in these related articles:

• Nearby city
• Other nearby city
• Region

Do you know Newport (Shropshire)? Please plunge forward and [[click here to create an article for this destination]].

But I know that would be something completely different :-) JuliasTravels (talk) 18:28, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

"we also do not like empty skeletons": If I may, where did you get this idea? We have an entire article status category for "empty skeletons", also known as outlines. Powers ^(talk) 20:22, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I echo LtPowers' feelings. We have never been anti-outline. I don't know why Newport (Shropshire) was nominated for vfd but it shouldn't have been. "An outline was created without content" is not a valid vfd OR redirect reason. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 12:14, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Well, I'd agree. In practice, however, redirects have been regularly created for places that could have their own article - and for years already. It seems to me that they are used too easily, and my impression is that this happens because some of us dislike creating or leaving skeletons for these places. I might be wrong about the motivation, though. Look at a place like Aliabad (which on WP is a disambiguation page with dozens of villages, or Azamgarh (population >110.000), or Acarigua (>200.000). Quite a few redirects are created as new articles, for places with arguably plenty of tourist interest (recently, e.g. Cluses, Oberstdorf, which are winter sports destinations with plenty of places to eat and sleep). So it's not just about vfd nominations, but about redirects for potential articles in general. JuliasTravels (talk) 17:58, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

I, for one, hate skeletons in that I hate "placeholders" being created for real places, but with no content. Either leave it, or provide some useful content - at least a proper outline please. I actually do use WV for my travel planning and find it infurating to have to go through a number of articles to see what's interesting in the region I travel to and find that there is no info in them. I mostly travel within Europe, and we've got it well covered for the most part, so I look for articles to know which places on the map are really worth visiting. Browsing through articles created just because a municipality exists, with no info on whether it has anything worth vistiing or not, is nothing but a waste of (traveller's) time.

As for being "antiwiki" in that it does not encourage content creation, I explained someplace else that we have a different content-creation pattern than originally assumed - we have a relatively small group of ardent editors, who tend to focus on a place or region and put a lot of content in within relatively short bursts. Very few articles were majorly created by accruing one-liners from a wide group of users - most owe large parts to individual users, and only some major ones see edits from truly diverse groups. In other words, the existence or not of a "stub" will not stop or deter a WV editor from creating a proper guide when they feel like it, but otherwise, the existence of a stub rarely translates into random content being added as time goes by. PrinceGloria (talk) 21:14, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

I have to agree in large parts with what User:PrinceGloria said regarding empty skeletons. Though (some) travel topics seem to have bucked the trend of only a few editors contributing to them... Another problem is that travel content ages infinitely worse than many other things a wiki can be written about. The way sugarcane is made into sugar may not change much over time, but the places you can go for to get a good rum in Estelí certainly do. Hence a hypothetical travel guide that accrued (most of) its content incrementally will (at least partially) be outdated at any given time. In the worst case to the point of unusability. We might of course in some pie in the sky future have a large enough editor base to rely on articles like Metz being updated by just as many people and just as regularly as USA currently is, but given the apparent trend of wikis to somehow become less used and edited and the fact that our google search penalty seems to still not be going anywhere more than a couple of years into the fork, I guess we have to find something that works with a userbase the size of ours and is able to convert some random passersby who were maybe referred here by a friend into casual or even frequent contributors... Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:57, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

I'm fairly certain you guys are underestimating how many people come in just to add a favorite event or restaurant to an article. If we have the outline already in place, it makes it much more likely that a person will do that. If the name of his or her city just redirects someplace else, he or she isn't likely to go to the trouble of figuring out how to change it into an article. Powers ^(talk) 03:25, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

I'd support everything PrinceGloria said. I understand that we are trying to be open and inclusive to all new editors, and that is something we obviously should continue to do, whether they just add a hotel listing or spend significant time trying to create a Guide level article. On the other hand we are creating a travel guide, with the aim of creating quality content and that actually helps real people doing real travel and with it "the traveler comes first". Great that new people are contributing, but that doesn't override our core mission.

What I would like to see is a compromise approach that allows us to keep a handle on structure and quality content, whilst still valuing the contributions of new users. Andrewssi2 (talk) 05:30, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

PrinceGloria, you said above "Either leave it, or provide some useful content - at least a proper outline please" -- I'm curious, what is a "proper outline"? -Shaundd (talk) 07:45, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

<indent reset>User:LtPowers, I don't think I do. I have hundreds of pages in my watchlist, and I truly do try to watch every change made. Quite a lot of this hundred are actually very minor destination articles. Very rarely does anybody add anything to those that is just a one-liner on a restaurant. Most of the one-liners I see go to large destinations. Moreover, when there are edits about obscure destinations, they often actually do go to regional articles or articles on neighbouring destinations and I am sometimes able to make some useful content or even a new guide out of it, I believe I was even prompted to create a whole city guide once by that (don't ask me to recall what city that was now tho...)
User:Shaundd - Wikivoyage:City guide status says "some of the sections (...) may have content", and I tend to read it as "more than one should have some content" or "it is OK for some sections to NOT have content" (e.g. no "drink" options or no info on getting around). What I am speaking of here are clear stubs like "XXX is a hamlet in YYY" and, in best cases, a one-liner in a section (not necessarily a listing even, it often is stuff like "XXX is popular for skiing", "There are mountains nearby" or "Bus 123 stops there" and that's it). PrinceGloria (talk) 08:47, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

I'm no fan of near-empty outlines either, but your interpretation is just that; it's not a representation of policy or practice. The full paragraph you quoted reads: Has at least the normal introductory paragraph (this can be as short as a single sentence describing where it is located) and a template outline laid out for the article. That seems pretty clear to me. An article with basic information on the most prominent attractions, how to get there and where to eat and sleep is not a "proper outline": it's already usable. I do share your doubt about the edits; I'm not convinced outlines necessarily stimulate edits either. Getting back to the core of the discussion though, there's just no basis in policy to redirect a city like Acarigua (just as an example) to a region. Those who dislike the empty outline that it was should expand the article, *or* gain consensus to delete it back to a red link. The discussion about redirects is not about choosing between editors and travellers either. A red link seems to benefit both more than a redirect to a region would. If the region at least mentions the destination (as a red link), it will automatically pop up in the search results. Deleting it is also not in line with current policy and practice, but I do think one could make a case for it. As for creating new articles as redirects for places that should one day get an article; we just shouldn't do that, imho. It would be better to create a red link with a short description in the parent region. That way it's clear we don't have an article for travellers but the region shows up in the search in case the want to read that, and it's easier for (new) editors to create the article. JuliasTravels (talk) 21:22, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Wait a second... I thought there was a policy to "always redirect real places" - does that mean that you want to change that policy or de facto policy? Also, I just recently found redlinks to stuff like Elbtal or Upper Swabia which are just awkward potential (extra)regional subdivisions that we really can't use for anything, can we? Hobbitschuster (talk) 21:30, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

No, the policy is not that we always redirect real places: the policy is that we do not delete them. For real places where we don't want an article (like tiny hamlets or non-useful extra-hierarchical regions) we should redirect; that's no point of discussion. Non-useful red links should just go away. My concern is that a growing group of editors seems to feel that almost-empty outlines are a bad thing, and as a result have started redirecting places which normally would just get an outline. The only thing I want, is that we do not redirect potentially good articles. That is no change of policy, I think; only a change of some editors' practice. JuliasTravels (talk) 21:50, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

I am sorry I understood you as if you wanted to delete (some of) those tiny hamlets instead of redirecting them. Hobbitschuster (talk) 22:11, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

I will respectfully disagree and say this does in fact appear to be a choice between 'editors and travellers'. I'm always going to argue for presenting the traveller with the most relevant information for their journey first, and the right for anyone to create empty destination articles should always be beneath that.

There is however a lot of latitude how we can achieve that. It will be country based with some tiny destinations (hamlets) being redirected to a district if it makes sense based on how the traveler will experience that country, and in fact no different from redirecting a city district destination to a city if that creates a better experience.

I'm OK to not automatically have redirects for potential (albeit unrealized) destinations if we are still allowed to make the guide as good as it can be, which would include deletion if the empty article is just not helping any traveler. Andrewssi2 (talk) 22:47, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

(indent) On the subject of the existence of an article garnering edits, I can attest that I myself am more likely to contribute to a created article than to make a new one. Yes, I've made new articles and it's not difficult, but nevertheless I'm much more likely to edit than to create, and I don't think I'm an anomaly. There are many redlink destinations that I know quite well but I've yet to create the articles. Single editors still sometimes flutter in and out of articles that over time do become good, but it took a long time to reach that point. Those edits should not be dismissed simply because the same person made them. I agree that one person typically carries the article, but I disagree that they're usually completed quickly without much time passing. I think people are looking at the final product without looking at how much time it actually took to get there. If a user creates one outline article, it's very unfriendly for us to "start the timer" and tell them if they don't make it a usable article in X days, we'll delete it. The complaints that we don't have a lot of editors cannot be addressed by pushing out new editors by telling them we only accept perfection. That's only going to make us more insular. Do we have any examples of what pages we are talking about being annoying? How many outlines are there in these places? The traveler sometimes has to deal with less-than-stellar articles. That doesn't mean we're not putting the traveler first. If we could see examples of regions with too many of these links it might help. Because right now, we have one article (Newport_(Shropshire)) that was nominated for deletion in spite of being a valid article. It makes the proposal look petty at best and dangerous to growth and development of all articles at worst, but if there are places that somebody has in mind, let's link them and see 1) If a lot of people feel there are too many empty spaces and therefore it's problematic and 2) If it's deemed to be a real issue, how to deal with it. Otherwise, I think we have to accept that WV is a constant work-in-progress which means that there are always going to be some disappointing articles. Redirecting every article that isn't a good read, doesn't have much content, or that we didn't find useful on our trip is against policy and more than a slippery slope. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 11:32, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't want my position to be misrepresented in the manner that appears directly above. No one is proposing 'quality standards' to justify an article's existence. I'm suggesting that if an article has really no useful information (and I mean really nothing, just an outline of sections and something like 'Town X is famous for cats') then deletion after a period of time should be an uncontroversial option. Andrewssi2 (talk) 05:53, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

So, the proposal is to delete Seki, Iwami and articles like them on the grounds that there is nothing other than an intro? But articles that have almost equally useless info, like Maibara, Nobeoka, Nasushiobara, Zentsuji, Ureshino, Oyano and Ninohe would be safe because there are words in other sections? ChubbyWimbus (talk) 12:25, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

There's a third option here. We could have skeleton-articles, but leave a note on the region page that it's a skeleton article. That way: Readers don't go to the article expecting an actual article with actual content. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 14:38, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

That's not a bad idea, actually. Some might oppose the risk of making our region guides look like works-in-progress due to "outline" tags on its cities. Powers ^(talk) 23:24, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

Redirects for non-travel related content

I deleted a few redirects today for general Disney character terms that were pointing at Disney.

The policy page doesn't actually state what should or should not be a redirect. Was I correct in removing Mickey Mouse to redirect to Disney?

Potentially a redirect such as this may improve our SEO. --Andrewssi2 (talk) 07:21, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

In this particular case the user who added them is almost certainly the same user who keeps showing up to create pages and categories about cartoons, so speedy deletion was definitely the right move. In general if someone creates one or two questionable redirects I don't think there is any harm, but in cases where someone is creating a bunch, or if that's their main contribution, then I think getting rid of them should be fine. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:08, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks! --Andrewssi2 (talk) 05:38, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

Redirects act differently in mainspace vs projectspace

Following a redirect normally leaves a notice at the top of the target page that the user was redirected. (E.g., if you follow the NYC redirect, you go to New York City, but it includes a "(Redirected from NYC)" notice.) The link in the redirect notice allows you to access the actual redirect page.

However, following a redirect to a page in other namespaces (including Wikivoyage: and User:, possibly others) leaves no redirect message at the top. (E.g., the WV:phone redirect, or User:(WT-en) LtPowers.) This leaves no easy way to access the redirect page (without massaging the URL to include "&redirect=no").

Is this intentional? Or is it a bug?

-- Powers ^(talk) 14:10, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

How to remove a redirect?

Swept in from the pub

I'd like to clean up Valencia (region), which is a bit of a mess. Currently Castellón (province) and Valencia (province) both redirect to Costa del Azahar, but this is incorrect as Costa del Azahar should be a bottom-level of Castellón (province) only (and not of Valencia (province)). Alicante (province) currently redirects to Costa Blanca; this is also incorrect as the Costa Blanca should be a bottom-level region of Alicante (province). I can't figure out how to remove the redirects, and would appreciate any suggestions. –StellarD (talk) 10:51, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

After you get redirected, right up the top of the page above the banner and breadcrumbs you'll see: "(Redirected from ...)". If you click on the the link, it'll take you to the original redirect page which you can edit to remove the redirect :) James A ▪ talk 11:17, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Redirects from destination's language name to English name

Are redirects from destination's language name to English name allowed or not? I wanted to create a few such redirects for cases where traveller is likely to be given the destination name in local language, but I found out that such redirect has been deleted in the past (Lednicko-valtický areál). I failed to find an answer to this question, maybe it should be added into this article? Heisy Bordel (talk, contributions) 13:12, 22 November 2018 (UTC)

A redirect like Montréal → Montreal is valid. See Wikivoyage:Naming conventions and Wikipedia:Foreign words. K7L (talk) 13:35, 22 November 2018 (UTC)

What was that redirect to? I wonder why it was deleted. Redirects from local names in Roman letters are fine. Ikan Kekek (talk) 08:06, 23 November 2018 (UTC)

It was redirect from Lednicko-Valtický areál to Lednice-Valtice (the latter has been moved to Lednice-Valtice Cultural Landscape since). Heisy Bordel (talk, contributions) 14:21, 23 November 2018 (UTC)

I'd love to hear a justification for the deletion. Ikan Kekek (talk) 14:58, 24 November 2018 (UTC)

Redirects

Swept in from the pub

Is it actually a policy to redirect everything with insufficient content? I am aware that we have a number of users who are rabid about their desire to redirect everything at the expense of usability and ttcf, but redirecting every article with little or no content is a bad idea. Recently User:Ground Zero redirected Shiroishi to Saga (prefecture) citing that the article had no content. This was clearly done without any research or consideration of the traveler given that there is another, more travel-oriented Shiroishi in Miyagi Prefecture that a traveler searching for Shiroishi is much more likely to be searching for, but also not considering that the redirect only creates frustration for the traveler even if they are looking for the Saga town. It feels like redirects for the sake of redirects under the guise of "not seeing bad articles". It's counterproductive to our goals and basic site usability. The site's philosophy used to be to leave articles (unless they were mass-created without content) to allow people to add content. Is this redirect out-of-line? In-line? Do we have a solid philosophy about this anymore? If it was really agreed upon that articles with little or no content are so egregious, that we must never have any, it would serve the traveler better to delete the article than to redirect articles, especially when users have no clue about any of the destinations, like in this case. Redirects shouldn't be made based on the content of the article but rather the merit of the redirect. ANY PLACE could be created without content, so with Ground Zero's thinking, any place is just as worthy of redirecting and not having an article as any other. I don't find that to be a good attitude regarding redirects nor do I think redirecting everything "until someone makes an article" is sensible either. These ways of thinking are focused on site management and aesthetics; We should be focused on the traveler/user when considering redirects and avoiding thoughtless redirects that will only frustrate and anger the traveler. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 12:30, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

I do this as well, just what GZ does. If a traveller just goes and sees nothing there, they may as well just be redirected to the relative page where there'd be more travel content there. (p.s. is it just me, or is this directed at GZ here) SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 12:34, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

I think SHB2000 answers the issue of relation between ttcf and redirect policy. Stubs and weak outlines are sometimes redirected to mechanically, as a combination of ttcf (the region article has more relevant content than the stub) and the policy not to delete articles on real places. For the region article to be relevant there must be enough information on the place in it. Good region Get around info may be useful for the traveller, but often the region article is mostly a list of places, not including the redirected one, or not really telling anything about the place. Even telling in what region the place lies can be useful, but as CW notes, there is no guarantee the redirect directs to the right region. I suppose what we need is a good guideline. Without that admins will often handle places they know nothing about in a less than ideal way, following policy and practice. –LPfi (talk) 13:11, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

One relevant question is whether redirects are needed for readers to find our region articles and articles about nearby cities. If a place really is handled in another article, a redirect is clearly useful. But turning redlinked cities in a region article into redirects back to the region article makes it hard to see what articles need to be written (could we have a tool for that, like sv-wp has for disambigs?), and I hope our search tools are able to find those redlinks and thus the region article. I think we need some analyses of important use cases, where a redirect is or is not useful. –LPfi (talk) 13:20, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

In saying that, I have also wondered the same. I've wanted to redirect this article to some other town, but can't (nearest town in the same region is 78km up a mountain) and there's no PoI's here. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 13:25, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

SHB2000 This is not directed at Ground Zero. It is directed at everyone who is making these kinds of redirects that are managerial and/or for site aesthetics rather than because the redirect is sensible and beneficial for the traveler. It's impossible to cite an example without an editor, though, and this one happened to be Ground Zero. I do think this edit is indicative of the general way in which this is done, though.

To me, if the point is to eliminate stubs or articles without content, the articles are best deleted. Just return them to square one. No inadvertent harm, confusion, or anger can be caused by this for someone searching for the city/town. The article will just show as a redlink where it is linked, which let's users know we don't have an article.

For redirects, I think the discussion should revolve around the destination itself rather than the article or its content. Lack of content may cause someone to question the city's ability to hold an article but lack of content itself doesn't equate to lack of destinations or inability to hold an article which are the useful and proper reasons to create redirects. I think redirects being created for the traveler and not the editors is the core of my complaint. I don't think we should create redirects for the editors' sakes. We should just delete them, if we really have decided content-less articles should not exist. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 14:06, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Empty skeletons should be deleted, no problem. And I don't think this is about readers vs editors: what we do for editors is to make them create content for the traveller. The problem arises when there is enough content that you don't want to simply delete the page. Somebody (GZ?) has started putting the redirect line in front of the article, allowing recreating it without going via the history. Sometimes the content is merged to a nearby town or into the region article. The question then is how much needs to be told about the place in that article to warrant a redirect. Usually the place should at least be mentioned. It seems you, CW, would put the threshold considerably higher. How much content should there be for you to merge and redirect rather than delete? –LPfi (talk) 14:42, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Expanding on ChubbyWimbus' comment, I think that if it's possible to create a decent article, then we shouldn't be redirecting. Instead, I'd rather see a sentence added that says something like "For more information, see the regional article" (with a link, of course).

It's very hard for a newcomer to add information to a redirected page, and to the reader, it seems to me that it signals that the place you're looking for wasn't important enough, or didn't have any potential. I've nothing against redirecting places that aren't likely to be viable articles, but if there's potential, I think we get more from leaving the page visible. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:57, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

No, it's not, and it's fully directed at GZ here, and that was an honesty question here.

Is it actually a policy to redirect everything with insufficient content? I am aware that we have a number of users who are rabid about their desire to redirect everything at the expense of usability and ttcf, but redirecting every article with little or no content is a bad idea. Recently User:Ground Zero redirected Shiroishi to Saga (prefecture) citing that the article had no content. This was clearly done without any research or consideration of the traveler given that there is another, more travel-oriented Shiroishi in Miyagi Prefecture that a traveler searching for Shiroishi is much more likely to be searching for, but also not considering that the redirect only creates frustration for the traveler even if they are looking for the Saga town. It feels like redirects for the sake of redirects under the guise of "not seeing bad articles". It's counterproductive to our goals and basic site usability. The site's philosophy used to be to leave articles (unless they were mass-created without content) to allow people to add content. Is this redirect out-of-line? In-line? Do we have a solid philosophy about this anymore? If it was really agreed upon that articles with little or no content are so egregious, that we must never have any, it would serve the traveler better to delete the article than to redirect articles, especially when users have no clue about any of the destinations, like in this case. Redirects shouldn't be made based on the content of the article but rather the merit of the redirect. ANY PLACE could be created without content, so with Ground Zero's thinking, any place is just as worthy of redirecting and not having an article as any other. I don't find that to be a good attitude regarding redirects nor do I think redirecting everything "until someone makes an article" is sensible either. These ways of thinking are focused on site management and aesthetics; We should be focused on the traveler/user when considering redirects and avoiding thoughtless redirects that will only frustrate and anger the traveler. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 12:30, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

That's all the highlighted points into what I think is a personal attack, and has been mentioned below. --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 22:10, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

SHB, I have no idea what you're trying to say by copying and striking out most of CW's comment. Are you saying that the question you struck out, "Is it actually a policy to redirect everything with insufficient content?", is a personal attack? Or the sentence you put in bold, "It's counterproductive to our goals and basic site usability"?

I'm also not sure what you're saying at the start. "No, it's not" – but what's "it"? No, it's not very hard for a newcomer to add information to a redirected page? No, it's not a problem when there is enough content that you don't want to simply delete the page? No, it's not not directed at Ground Zero? (That was three comments ago.) No, it's not something else? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:28, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

When I meant "No it's not". I meant that CW was lying about it being not directed at Ground Zero here. The text in bold is just what should have been rewritten into a more civil manner, and is disruptive and uncivil. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 23:29, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

I think it would be better – more civil, in its original sense of "building up the group" – if you removed this (and two my comments about them, too). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:28, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

At the moment, I am not going to engage with the substance of this discussion. I will leave the discussion to other contributors, and will take a break from editing.

I will comment on the tone, however. The heading "Redirect Cult" and the rest of ChubbyWimbus's comments make it clear that this is going to be a heated and contentious discussion, and I don't want to deal with that aggravation at the moment. It is pretty clear that CW is agitated and is looking for a fight. I'm not.

I have been working on the list of short articles for weeks now. I have not deleted any articles about real places because of our policy of not deleting articles about real places. I have created redirects instead. This is the first objection I have heard. No one has questioned me or asked me to slow down, or raised any questions about what I've been doing. Getting blasted like this by CW is not making this a good day for me.

Writing "This is not directed at Ground Zero" doesn't change the tone of comments like "without any research or consideration of the traveler", "creates frustration for the traveler", "redirects for the sake of redirects", "thoughtless redirects that will only frustrate and anger the traveler", "create redirects for the editors' sakes".

I am always prepared to discuss WV policy, and accept the decision of the community. But if CW does not believe that I am here to build a travel guide for the benefit of travellers, there isn't much basis for discussion. Ground Zero (talk) 15:31, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Hear, hear. I'm not engaging with a discussion founded on personal attacks.--ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 16:24, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

And, since I have been accused of having:

"redirected Shiroishi to Saga (prefecture) citing that the article had no content. This was clearly done without any research or consideration of the traveler given that there is another, more travel-oriented Shiroishi in Miyagi Prefecture that a traveler searching for Shiroishi is much more likely to be searching for"

I will point out that the total content of the Shiroishi article was "Shiroishi (白石町) is a town in Saga Prefecture, Japan." There was no disambiguation or any other mention of Shiroshi, in Miyagi Prefecture. That is not my fault. I did not create that stub article. If CW thinks we should have an article for that town, he should create one. Ground Zero (talk) 16:58, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

I suppose we should change our policy to allow deleting such articles, unless the user starts working on them. This is were to_be_checked=date (in {{outlinecity}} & al) could come in handy, as the article is seen in RC when it is created, but then disappears from sight. Can we trust a new user not writing more than that to have gotten it right? One could check Wikipedia and add some basic information, but I for one prefer to choose what articles to work on over working on a laundry list by users who do not care to do a minimum by themselves. –LPfi (talk) 17:47, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

The specific example included a Template:Routebox, a page banner, and coordinates.

I'm pretty sure that I asked about all these "skeleton" pages a few years ago, very likely on this page, and was told that the community wanted to keep them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:28, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

It had the default Mena-asia banner. The routeboxes are problematic, as removing one of the articles will break the chain. One of the neighbours was a similar content-less outline. Both are from the WT days. Perhaps the routebox and coords make them worth keeping, as somebody using the routebox navigation can at least see where they are going and add content if they happen to stop there (and building routebox trails is some work). Somebody searching for the place in other ways will be disappointed. –LPfi (talk) 20:10, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Deleting non-vandalistic articles about real places would be a major policy change for this site and should be discussed at Wikivoyage talk:Votes for deletion. I think it opens up a big can of worms, and I would not support it. If we changed that policy, we'd have undeveloped articles about major cities deleted just because someone didn't know that the article title is actually a major city that merits an article. We've already had such articles be nominated for deletion and/or redirection, though I can't recall specific titles at the moment. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:16, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Otherwise I don't understand creating articles without adding content into them, but for a routebox trail it makes sense. I'd also be tempted to create articles for intermediate destinations. Redirecting an article with a routebox should not be done without reconstructing the trail, as ending up in the prefecture article when following the routebox trail is very confusing, and there is no easy way out. You are probably right on cities in less known countries being in danger, something worth a reminder every now and then. –LPfi (talk) 20:30, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

In saying that, often I've created articles because I've wanted to work on them, but due to my lack of time due to offline issues, it's remained as an outline. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 21:47, 21 July 2021 (UTC)

Personally I'm neither a fan of redirecting outlines of valid destionations nor outright deleting them. It becomes very hard to recreate and expand the redirects as they appear blue and the reader who clicks on the link will end up getting confused (the redirect is often to a fairly distant city or broad region). Deleting is somewhat less misleading but can still make a city disappear, especially redlinks are often removed on the site and so the trail to the deleted city has gone. It's worse when an outline with some information (no listing but has 1 or 2 sentences apart from the lede) is redirected or deleted because actual travel-related information has been removed from the site, and I've seen that happen unfortunately. It doesn't matter how limited the information is. If a city has one line about the main airport serving it or the major road connecting it to the rest of the country, the article should be expanded rather than redirected/deleted. Gizza ^(roam) 04:47, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

I'd support that stand, were it not for some users creating too many weak outlines. A few are no problem, but if you are interested in an area and mostly find weak outlines, you'll go elsewhere. With those being redlinks or non-links instead, you'd see what we actually have, which may be enough, or you'd be able to use that information and look for other destinations elsewhere. We need some means to keep the proportion of weak outlines to usable articles under control. The means may be unlinking, redirecting or deleting those outlines, but I am open to other suggestions. We might of course give up, and just wait for the outlines to be fleshed out at some point, possible in distant future. –LPfi (talk) 09:24, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Unfortunately, we've got far too many of those. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 09:36, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

If there's a single user makes tons of skeletons and then disappears, I support deleting those skeletons. But if there are outlines due to other reasons, it would be better to set up a Collaboration of the Month/Expedition/Edit-a-thon and grow the articles. All of the CotMs and edit-a-thons we've had have been successful, most recently the Nigeria one. Right now there are 1082 city articles that are less than 1000 bytes. The articles are just under 1000 tend to have some useful information. The truly useless ones are probably half that number. If we can set up a few more tailored edit-a-thons bringing in external editors as well as encourage the long-term editors here to expand those particular articles, even if they only focus on countries they are interested in, we should be able to expand most of them within a year. Gizza ^(roam) 13:15, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

Gizza, I wonder if you have a sort of "statute of limitations" on making tons of skeletons and disappearing. If someone made tons of skeletons ten years ago (let's say that person did nothing else), but isn't active now, would you delete them now?

(I'm personally in favor of discouraging people from mass-creating any more skeletons. An occasional one, sure, but not hundreds.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:30, 22 July 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: to be fair and consistent, I don't think there should be a statute of limitations as such. But I also don't expect many of these mass-produced skeletons created many years to still be around. The empty articles post-fork were deleted so there could be a bunch from after 2013 but we've usually discouraged editors to go on an article creation frenzy and they usually listen or if not, get blocked. Gizza ^(roam) 04:37, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

If an article becomes a redirect, then I think that there must be something about the redirected place in the target article. If Nearville is redirected to Smallville, then a search of the Smallville article must show a listing or a sentence that relates to Nearville. Otherwise the reader is going to be confused. As an example of this not being done, look at Genoa (Victoria) - there nothing about Genoa in the article that it has been merged into, so a reader clicking on the links from Gippsland will think that something has gone wrong. When redirecting please also look at "What links here" and adjust or delete incoming links appropriately - in the extreme case avoid creating a loop. AlasdairW (talk) 22:52, 23 July 2021 (UTC)

And you don't want to add a minor countryside attraction (or the countryside Get in or local service station café) to an article on a city with a ton of word-class attractions. Thus merging those nearby destinations is not the way to go. You can link to the city from Get in, though, and that would handle most things that a redirect would tell the reader. –LPfi (talk) 08:34, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

I began working on Special:ShortPages at the beginning of May and this is the first discussion there has been. I chose this project because I think a lot of readers, like me, are annoyed by links that take me to pages that provide no information. I think these links turn readers off from Wikivoyage. A lot of these articles say nothing more than "Larson is a town in Western North Dakota." These useless articles do not make Wikivoyage more usable for readers. Keeping these articles because we hope that some day someone will expand them does nothing for our current readers.

I have not been taking a "managerial" approach to this, but have been working to build Wikivoyage into a better travel guide.

Where I think that the place should have an article, I've expanded it using text adapted from other language Wikivoyages and Wikipediae. Here are some examples from the past three weeks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31.

Where the short pages are disambiguation pages, I've left them alone.

In most other cases, I have redirected the article to the region, and deleted the link to the article from the region page to avoid "creating a loop", which User:LPfi and User:AlasdairW are concerned about.

Some of these short articles were created for really small places: Mustang (Texas) has a population of 21, Almont_(North_Dakota) has 89, and Cilybebyll has "a dozen houses". I have come across a couple of articles created for the purpose of listing a single restaurant, which has since closed. I don't think Wikivoyage should have an article on a tiny place just because someone who passed through Wikivoyage 14 years ago created one (what LPfi called a "laundry list").

I've only been redirecting short articles that have been sitting for years with no substantive edits. Shiroishi, for example, was created in 2007, and has had no information added to it since then. There were a lot of short articles created by User:Texugo in 2013. They continued to edit in Wikivoyage until 2020 without ever going back to expand those stubs.

When I find a short article has been created recently, I ask the creator if they are planning to expand, as I did here: Talk:Columbus (Nebraska). That served as a reminder for the article creator who then turned it into a worthwhile article.

If there is just one interesting thing mentioned in the article, I will move that to the region article, and redirect the article there so that the reader gets the information without having to click through. This article was created to list a water park in a suburb of Fort Worth, and had no other information. I redirected the article to Fort Worth (and expanded/updated the listing) because I think it is more useful to readers than in a separate article.

I had not considered the route boxes issue that User:WhatamIdoing raised. I think that redirected articles should be removed from route boxes and replaced by the next available blue link.

Whether I redirect or expand an article depends on a number of factors, including population (User:Ikan Kekek: I wouldn't redirect a major city, or a even a small city), availability of information from other sources, and my mood. I'm doing the work, so I will use my discretion.

If any other editor thinks that a particular article should be expanded rather than redirected, they are free to expand the article, and will hear no objection from me.

Also, I am changing the title of this discussion in line with keeping WV a civil, friendly place. Ground Zero (talk) 11:42, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for changing the title as well as making the English Wikivoyage a better place for readers :) SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 11:48, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

There is a rather long earlier discussion that overlaps this one considerably, starting at Wikivoyage_talk:Deletion_policy/Archive_2014-2019#Deleting_NEW_empty_articles and continuing into later sections of that page. Everything I would want to say here, I already said there. Pashley (talk) 12:57, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for that link. There are four things we can do with short articles:

1. delete
2. redirect
3. expand
4. leave them alone

It does seem that we have failed to get consensus about deleting short articles, although in the case of a page-creation vandal, I think there may be support for doing so.

I have been doing a combination of redirection and expansion. Those who support expansion over redirection are welcome to expand any articles I have redirected. By commenting out the structure, I have made it easy to do restart the article.

For reasons explained above, I don't think that short articles that have been lying around for years without content provide any benefits to readers, and diminish their experience on Wikivoyage.

As I started with the shortest articles and have been progressing to slightly longer articles that have at least a little travel content, I am finding that I am doing more expansion and less redirection. Ground Zero (talk) 19:15, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

I appreciate your work and generally approve of what you're doing in redirecting articles when that seems best. I mentioned that there's been at least one nomination to delete a stub article about a significant city because I oppose deleting articles just because of lack of content. You're not doing that. Ikan Kekek (talk) 20:14, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

I see merit in the argument for deleting stubs, but I don't see much support for it, so I am working within existing policy as I understand it. Ground Zero (talk) 22:20, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

I think some redirects are unnecessary & harmful.

For example, SHB2000 wrote above: "I've wanted to redirect this article to some other town, but can't (nearest town in the same region is 78km up a mountain) and there's no PoI's here." Then he or she did redirect it.

My comment is at Talk:Khancoban. Other opinions solicited. Pashley (talk) 01:23, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

I've commented on Talk:Khancoban. FYI: I'm a he (not a she). SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 03:13, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

Also Pashley, if I may bring this up, but this is about the language used here in "unnecessary & harmful". Ground Zero also brought this up at vfd before.

1. It may seem unnecessary to you, but not to anyone
2. I think calling my actions as harmful would be an overstatement. How is it harmful? As I mentioned, it may seem harmful to you, but not everyone. Please explain how it is harmful?

--SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 01:37, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Pashley (and DaGizza). I generally don't like redirecting real destinations and feel that it should be avoided as much as possible. Sometimes it does make sense, but for sure some redirects are indeed unnecessary and/or harmful (and we need to be able to express such sentiments without being language-policed). For the Shiroishi redirect: The Shiroishi redirect is harmful in that the linked article has no relevant information about the town and there is another city of the same name of greater fame located far away, so the redirect is inaccurate and confusing for a traveler looking for that destination. Redirects that are inaccurate, confuse rather than helpful, or take you to pages that don't have information on the redirect all qualify as "unnecessary and unhelpful". I should not have said "Ground Zero's way of thinking" in my initial post, beause I see this "way of thinking" as being beyond any one user however, his response highlights the issues I brought up in my other points (which are about what I see as a faulty way to create and think about redirects, not about him). The person creating the redirect is obviously not responsible for the lack of information in the article, but redirecting articles is a choice, so I think if a user makes that choice, there needs to be some consideration and work involved to make it work. A user who doesn't have any knowledge about a place should absolutely do some research outside of WV if they're going to try and create a redirect, and failing to do so is creating a "thoughtless redirect". Citing the lack of information in an article that you want to merge for that very same lack of information as the reason for making a harmful redirect doesn't make sense. Research, consideration of the destination, consideration of what information is being lost or a commitment to moving all information in the article to the target redirect should be seen as requirements in order to redirect. Otherwise, just leave the article alone. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 12:24, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm going to stop participating in this thread due to the high level of uncivil comments here. Calling my and Ground Zero's redirects as harmful really takes the cake here. Could you please explain how? I just like GZ a few days back, will take a break from doing major editing, and will only do some minor edits. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 12:31, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

Think about this from the perspective of the traveler. You want to go to place A. You go to Wikivoyage and search for place A. And Wikivoyage says "How about place B instead? It's only two hours' driving away from the place you wanted o visit".

Reasonable people could hold different opinions about what's best, but it is not unreasonable to say that getting sent to a place B when you searched for place A is providing something worse than just giving people place A (which had a link to place B). Doing something worse is "harmful". It may not be significantly or importantly harmful, but it's still making things worse (according to some people's opinions), and making things worse is technically "harming".

As for it being "unnecessary", surely you don't want to claim that it was absolutely necessary to redirect that page. Some people might say that it was a good decision, but I doubt that even its most ardent supporters would claim that it was truly necessary. Nothing was going to break, nobody was going to get sued, nobody was going to get sick if we left those pages alone. Therefore, even if it was a "good" action, it was not, strictly speaking, a "necessary" one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:55, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

If I am interested in going to Place A in Region B, I would rather be taken to an article about Region B than to an article that says nothing more than "Place A is a town in Region B". The redirect improves the reader's experience in Wikivoyage: it means one less click, and does not leave the reader with the impression that Wikivoyage articles are a waste of their time. Ground Zero (talk) 18:34, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

I redirect articles in the same reasoning as GZ mentioned above. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 22:05, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

I have responded to CW on my talk page, but the key point remains that the tone of his comments, and calling what SHB2000 and I have been doing a "cult", demonstrated that he was looking for a fight, rather than trying to engage constructively. He has at least acknowledged that I am a constructive editor, despite what he wrote above.

I have demonstrated that the premise of his post was false, i.e., that we are "redirecting every article with little or no content". So the whole discussion is a waste of time.

As I noted above, when there is a little bit of information about a place, I transfer that to the redirect article so no information is being lost.

With respect to Shiroishi, the article that I redirected had no information beyond its location in a region far away from "another city of the same name of greater fame". It sat there for 14 years without being improved or corrected. The creator of the article obviously knew nothing about the place (or chose not to share what they knew). Redirecting it was an improvement in the reader's experience.

ChubbyWimbus could improve the redirect or create an article, which would be even better than the redirect I created, but instead came to the pub to create ill-will with a false accusation and inflammatory language.

Colloborative projects work when contributors pool their knowledge and work together. They do not work by having everyone stand back and wait for an expert to do something. As far as I know, CW is the only Japan-based contributor we have, and waiting for him to take care of it hasn't improved the article.

Name-calling and false accusations are not constructive behaviour. When we call out ChubbyWimbus for this, instead of retracting and apologizing, he complains of being "language-policed". Whatever. There are lots of places on the Internet where he can vent his rage. Let's try to keep Wikivoyage fun. Ground Zero (talk) 18:34, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

(indent) Can we agree then that redirects should not be created on the basis of the articles simply lacking content? My intent was to raise the bar for when we create redirects to require some research (or personal expertise) in order to justify why the intended redirect is the best place for information about the town/city that is being redirected. I disagree with Ground Zero that the region article is more helpful. As I said before, I think we need to think about the destinations themselves and not whatever content is currently in the article in order to redirect. This is a difference in approach, so the discussion is not moot. Others have also stated similar feelings or other feelings about our redirecting approach. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 11:04, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

I agree that "lacking content" is not a sufficient reason (by itself) to redirect an article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:54, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

No, of course we can't agree. Several others have said this too.

CW began this discussion with a false accusation, ascribed untoward motivations to me, and made a personal attack. That is no basis for coming to any sort of agreement.

He is continuing with his false premise that I have been redirecting "on the basis of the articles simply lacking content". I have created articles for places that I believed warranted them, and redirecting others. I provided links to more than 30 short articles that I have expanded in the last three weeks alone. CW has not contributed content in the last month, so I don't need my work to be directed by him.

His comments obviously don't describe my work: "without any research or consideration of the traveler", "redirects for the sake of redirects", "thoughtless redirects that will only frustrate and anger the traveler", "create redirects for the editors' sakes". My work shows that I am here to build a better travel guide, not just to argue about stuff.

I get that he disagrees that Shiroishi (Saga) is more important than Shiroishi (Miyagi), but his complaint is with the editor who created the article before abandoning it in 2007, not with me. I would fully support him creating an article about Shiroishi (Miyagi), or even changing the redirect, but he is not interested in doing so.

I will continue to work to improve this guide by adding content, improving formatting, and yes, redirecting pointless articles about tiny places that have languished for years without any useful information for travellers.

I would encourage CW to focus on adding content to article instead of throwing stink bombs into the pub like this.

I ask our editors what they think about CW's unconstructive behaviour. Ground Zero (talk) 21:41, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

Still no apology to GZ. To CW: Don't make the same mistake as what to AC made 3 years back in not apologising. Just apologize instead of trying to defend yourself. SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta.wikimedia) 21:49, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

I support the contributions of Ground Zero, SHB2000 and others. If one or two redirects shouldn’t have been redirected, these should have been treated as individual cases. I have faith that both of these users are well-intentioned and use redirects to concentrate and develop content in article-worthy destinations. This helps us achieve our various geographical expeditions. These editors need their contributing efforts viewed as a whole; often two outlines are turned into one usable article, and that’s a good thing. If a redirect is used, in many of these cases whether or not the redirect was a good idea, the end result had better travel content than before. Such edits are a net positive and should be viewed as progress within the travel guide. If CW would like to restore a redirected article such as the one mentioned and write an article for it, that would however be an excellent way to resolve this debate. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 22:04, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

To put this nonsense to bed, I redirected Shiroishi to Miyagi, and added a brief description so that someone who searches on Shiroishi will find some info about the town and the Wikidata link. And I fixed the route boxes. It took a few minutes. ChubbyWimbus could have done this a week ago and avoided a lot of aggravation and wasted time, but he's going to focus on what he enjoys. Ground Zero (talk) 00:16, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Ground Zero "but he's going to focus on what he enjoys." I do not "enjoy" any of this. This discussion actually does have a purpose that was not about your or Shiroishi. I did not start this discussion to call you out. As I said on your talk page, I was not even aware that you were the only one doing these edits. I acknowledge that some of my words and phrasing made it seem otherwise and I do apologize for that.

SHB2000 I did apologize on his talk page, and I believe you commented on that same thread. I apologized here just above, as well, if it's better to attach it here directly.

Selfie City I, too, support the contributions of Ground Zero. This was not meant to be a discussion about GZ as a contributor. It was meant to be about improving our redirect policy. I do regret that my wording muddied the waters. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 14:47, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

If it is not about the work that I have been doing, or about Shiroishi (the only example cited), is there even a problem here? I have been using my discretion to determine which articles I will expand (and have expande lot of them), and which articles I think should be redirected. I don't think that my discretion is faulty.

If you disagree with any if my decisions about redirects, you can prove me wrong by adding content to an article, and Wikivoyage will be better. Ground Zero (talk) 15:19, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

A proposal

This is how I should have started this to begin with. In my understanding, we have allowed (or encouraged?) redirecting articles based on having little-to-no content. It is not a "falsehood" about GZ, because it is not about GZ. It is about what seemed to be a soft consensus prior to this discussion. GZ's edit information when he made Shiroishi into a redirect stated "Redirect until there is some travel information here". That showed that it was a redirect created for lack of content (re: travel info). Since it didn't seem clear before: I do NOT think he was acting against our redirect policy. On the contrary, I think he WAS acting according to policy and that's what I wanted to change in this discussion, the POLICY. That's why simply making Shiroishi an article (which I may do, but didn't want to do during this discussion) doesn't address what I see an issue. WhatamIdoing agrees, and I think Pashley and possibly other agree with that, as well. I think it may be helpful to include REASONS to redirect (and possibly not to redirect) on Wikivoyage:How to redirect a page, so that we can hopefully avoid future discussions of this nature since there do seem to have been other times where we've had the same sorts of redirect discussions that don't seem to be adding clarity. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 14:47, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

I agree that we need a guideline on when an article should be (merged and) redirected. –LPfi (talk) 15:02, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Are we creating a guideline where there isn't a problem? The only redirect I created cited as a problem has been fixed.

I will change the explanation I use to make it clear that I am redirecting because I believe a place to be too small or uninteresting to warrant an article. And I invite other editors to prove me wrong by adding content to a redirected article to make the article useful for travellers. (That is why I comment out the skeleton rather than deleting it.) Ground Zero (talk) 15:19, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Has somebody analysed what categories of articles there are that get redirected? The articles we now discuss are mostly weak stubs, but what cases are clear, and in what cases is there disagreement about whether to redirect? –LPfi (talk) 15:06, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

To me, I don't think "weak stubs" is necessarily a clear reason to redirect, either. My thoughts are that redirecting real places should only be done if someone knows or researches enough to say with some level of certainty that the city/town could not sustain its own article and that the targeted redirect will be sensible and helpful for the traveler. If one of those is not met, I think the article, even if it's an ugly stub, should be left alone. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 15:24, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

It is not a clear reason, but is there a problem with other articles being redirected? I think what we need is a guideline on what weak outlines should be redirected.

I think the problem is for regions like Päijänne Tavastia. There are now five useful bluelinks, one linked weak outline (Sysmä, with just a campsite) and six redlinks. I think that is OK. If somebody makes the redlinks weak outlines there will be a problem. After clicking two or three of them a reader will get frustrated (at least if they do not hit any of the useful ones). We had a regular turning redlinks to such weak outlines in a few other regions of Finland. I did expand most of the outlines in two of them (I think), but I don't want to have an outline creator direct my work.

The outlines in one of the regions were taken to VFD, but as we don't delete real places, they became redirects. The result was Finland Proper having bluelinks only, most of them pointing back to the region article. I would have deleted them instead, to keep it clear for readers what places we do have information on. That was a region I was working on, so only a few of the redirects remain redirects (and I have unlinked those in the region article), but I think this destroyed the region article for the time until I had written the articles. The little useful information (see Rymättylä and Velkua as by the creator) either was in the region article already, could have been added there, or could have been put on the talk pages at time of deletion, to be added when somebody creates worthwhile articles.

In these cases I think the articles should have been deleted rather than redirected or kept – the places are found in the region article by anyone who searches for them. We should also discuss the threshold for keeping an article. I think a few weak outlines per region is OK, and creating several articles to be worked on a bit later is also acceptable, But a majority of articles in a region being weak outlines that nobody is working on is a real problem – for the traveller who tries to use Wikivoyage.

The obvious case for a redirect is when an article is about several places (cf Rural areas). Redirects to a region is sensible when the place is not mentioned as redlink, but perhaps as part of a redlinked city or other destination in that region, or there is some worthwhile information about the place. I don't have much experience about these cases, so I hope somebody can expand on them.

–LPfi (talk) 16:59, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

With the regard to the proposal that "redirecting real places should only be done if someone knows or researches enough to say with some level of certainty that the city/town could not sustain its own article and that the targeted redirect will be sensible and helpful for the traveler", we do not impose such a requirement on article creation, which is why we end up with articles that say nothing more than "Shiroishi (白石町) is a town in Saga Prefecture, Japan." Having a higher standard for redirection than for article creation is backwards to me.

Also, creating a policy because one user disagreed with one redirect done by another user (the only example provided) is not a good use of time. Let's address these issues on talk pages.

To answer User:LPfi's question, "Has somebody analysed what categories of articles there are that get redirected?", I can have described my process for deciding whether to expand or redirect an article, or to contact the article's creator, in the discussion above. I redirect in a way to make it easy for someone to create a useful article if they think there should be one.Ground Zero (talk) 17:08, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

See Rymättylä and Velkua (links repeated from above) for pages I don't think we need any research other than a look at the content and the region article (where they are linked) to tell they are not useful. If local knowledge is required, such bare outlines will remain in areas none of us knows. Even when there is online information, doing the research is time-consuming, and I don't think creating such an outline can put an obligation on anybody to do that research. Redirecting may not be the solution, though. –LPfi (talk) 17:29, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

These articlrs were created by a problem user. I don't know whether Vkem qualifies as a mass article creation vandal. I asked Vkem on their talk page to stop creating skeleton articles and I believe they did stop. In retrospect, deletion may have been a better approach, but I am not sure if policy allows it. Thanks to you for creating articles for these places. Creating those articles made Wikivoyage better. Ground Zero (talk) 17:40, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Based on the interpersonal conflict above, I think we might benefit from a greater level of clarity and/or process.

Here's my take on the goals:

• Don't redirect a place solely on the basis of the current content. (Why? Because it'd be silly to redirect a large city just because there wasn't any content on the page yet.) This means that if you want to redirect a page because it's got no content, then you need two reasons: your first no-content reason plus any other plausible excuse.
• Do redirect a place that you believe is unlikely (i.e., "in your personal opinion, less than 50% chance of") to become a well-developed article even if someone took an interest in it. (For example: zero or only one place to sleep and eat, and there's a plausible target for merging = consider a redirect).
• Do redirect a place that could be more easily or sensibly described in the context of a larger article.

In terms of process, my thoughts are:

• If you're fairly sure, then plunge forward.
• If it might be controversial, then propose a merge.
• If someone redirected a page that you think was not the best candidate for redirecting, then revert it and either expand it enough to show why you think it shouldn't be redirected, or propose a merge on the talk page to determine consensus (in this case, you'd be proposing an 'unmerge', but I think the process can stretch that far).

The other part of the process is the hard part: we needs to be not being overly blameful towards anyone whose judgment happens to differ from our own. That may need to be a work in progress. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:07, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Also, you are all allowed to disagree with me! If you think we need different goals or different processes, please say so. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:07, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

That sounds like a good starting point for a policyguideline. I think articles should be redirected upon the basis of wiaa. If a place has nowhere to stay (or if the only options are awful and in short supply) a redirect makes sense as this is not a valid travel destination (particularly if also short on restaurants and other attractions). However a poorly developed article for a city with tens of thousands of people, attractions, and hotels should be improved as there is potential. This policy would be fairly in line with current practices while also supporting maximum content development. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 21:28, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

I would caution that "Can you sleep there?" is neither a necessary nor always a sufficient reason for an article; it's merely a rough guideline. Otherwise, I think your rule of thumb is sensible. Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:49, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

I think most of what is said above sounds reasonable. I would add something to the affect of: "Don't redirect if you cannot find a proper/helpful target article (even if you are sure the city/town can't hold its own article).

I also question whether our advice to redirect to the region article is sensible or helpful in practice. Is there an article where that has been done well? LPfi above talks about it "destroying" a region, and I also think this tends to mess things up more than solve things. If we look at his example of Päijänne Tavastia, I agree that someone making all of the redlinks into content-less articles would be bad. But if someone did that and then those were all redirected back to Päijänne Tavastia, I think that would also be a problem. A region article with some cities linked but also with listings from random cities (that may be on opposite ends of cities with listings within the region) is difficult to edit/curate, and difficult to navigate and understand for readers. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 10:30, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

In a sparsely populated US county, I'd expect to find most of the information at the county level. (There are ~3,000 counties in the US, and some have with fewer than 1,000 residents.) Redirecting the tiny towns/villages/wide spots in the road to the county level would not be unreasonable. I would expect the same thing in a rural area. Don't send me to "Tinyville, pop. 239"; send me to "Rural area, pop. 810", with a redirect to Tinyville. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:11, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

First, I want to thank User:WhatamIdoing for trying to resolve this in a constructive way. I am amazed, though, that any random passerby is free to create any article with no useful content, but we need an elaborate guideline for redirects, and that redirecting skeleton articles is even an issue. Harrison (Michigan) was created in 2006 with the text "Harrison is in Michigan." Over the next 15 years, it was expanded to read "Harrison is in Clare County, Central Michigan." It is a place with fewer than 2,000 people, and no apparent points of interest. Folowing my usual practice, I have redirected it to Central Michigan, and removed the selflinks from the region article so it doesn't lead readers in a loop. I have also adjusted the route box. There are no larger places nearby for which a redirect makes sense to me. If someone wants to change the redirect, they should plunge forward and do it.

I don't object to anything in User:WhatamIdoing's version, but this really comes across like a solution in search of a problem. Ground Zero (talk) 11:48, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

I like the status quo, but I think we need a guideline (not a policy) on the matter. I don't see how redirecting Harrison (Michigan) would be a violation of WhatamIdoing's guideline/policy. As I see it, the proposed guideline does not change the status quo significantly, and sets standards similar to the de facto procedure. By putting these in writing, we can hopefully avoid debates as to the guideline on the matter.

If a "random passerby" creates a mainspace page that is an outline with no content besides the lede paragraph, we should explain to the user that this is not an acceptable article and allow for a redirect if the new page fails wiaa. If the random passerby creates enough outlines, then this activity should be classified as disruptive editing, because this makes work for other contributors. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 12:11, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

I should have been cleaer: if a random passerby created a skeleton article 8, 12 or 15 years ago.... For new articles, I take it up with the editor as I did on Talk:Columbus (Nebraska). We ended up with a good article because of that. Ground Zero (talk) 12:26, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Yes, that was a problem when those skeleton articles were created. But I believe many of them were deleted? See Wikivoyage talk:Article status#Progress in bringing down number of outline cities.

Meanwhile I have created User:SelfieCity/Should I merge two pages?. Feel free to edit so we can ultimately move to project space. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 13:21, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

A lot of them weren't deleted, that's why I am working to clean them up now. We've spent a lot of time discussing policy and guidelines, and I'm tired of it. I need to spend more time improving the travel guide now, so I'm not going to comment. Ground Zero (talk) 13:27, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

GZ, in my proposal, redirecting Harrison (Michigan) would have been the right thing to do. You had a plausible reason that wasn't solely the page being basically empty ("too small/uninteresting to warrant an article"). I wouldn't have changed a thing about what you did there.

If someone else decided that you made a mistake, it'd be that other person's job to either:

• prove that Harrison was an obviously viable destination by expanding the article, or
• start a consensus-oriented discussion to find out what other contributors think.

The biggest change I could imagine to your process is that you might use more edit summaries that say "too small/uninteresting to warrant an article" and fewer that say "no content since 2006". WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:28, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

I would say a guideline here makes sense over a guideline about article creation because it is mostly users who have spent some time editing that create redirects, while new articles are more likely to be created by random people who don't know or care about the guidelines. But also, we want more articles, so in theory, we promote and encourage article creation. Creating redirects is not a goal or something we promote or encourage users to do. It's something that is only warranted under specific circumstances, and it's better if there is a guideline so editors all know and understand what those circumstances are.

I'm going to repost this, because I think it's important and would like thoughts/responses as to the effectiveness of the "redirect to the region" advice we have always given: Like LPfi above, I also question whether our advice to redirect to the region article is sensible or helpful in practice. Is there an article where that has been done well? LPfi above talks about it "destroying" a region, and I also think this tends to mess things up more than solve things. If we look at his example of Päijänne Tavastia, I agree that someone making all of the redlinks into content-less articles would be bad. But if someone did that and then those were all redirected back to Päijänne Tavastia, I think that would also be a problem. A region article with some cities linked but also with listings from random cities (that may be on opposite ends of cities with listings within the region) is difficult to edit/curate, and difficult to navigate and understand for readers. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 14:25, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

From the perspective of someone actually doing the work, I think redirects should be determined based on the facts of each case. In the case of Harrison (Michigan), there was no logical city to redirect it to. Redirecting it to the region article made the most sense, and it did not create a redirect back because I removed the selflink as I always do. If you want to change the redirect, you should plunge forward and do it. Wikivoyage is the travel guide you can edit. I disagree that the sort of article creation that resulted in Harrison (Michigan) is a goal. It is a waste of the reader's time. I'm not going to address the hypothetical provided above because I want to focus on making real improvements to Wikivoyage, including adding content. Ground Zero (talk) 15:03, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

I think GZ makes a valid point. There’s a growing mentality of some people doing the work while the other part criticize the work. I don’t think it’s fair to criticize work unless you also chip in to help the project. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 15:29, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Yes, it is a valid point. But with a guideline more people might be confident to plunge forward. I know I had deleted the Finnish empty outlines, but consensus was to redirect instead, based on our policy. I don't see the point in the Harrison (Michigan) redirect. It does little harm, as few will search for that town, but I don't know those that do are much served by the redirect. OK, the town is mentioned in Central Michigan, but wouldn't they have found the region article without the redirect? Even if they don't know it's there, a search will find it. Perhaps few of the redirects do any harm, we just have to unlink them and add mentions about the places in redirect targets. I thought, though, that a discussion like this, and a guideline, is the way we document best practices, perhaps even develop them, and I thought it is a good thing that our best practices are well.known. –LPfi (talk) 19:17, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

If the reader is looking to see what there is to do in Central Michigan, and they click on the skeleton Harrison article, all they learn is that Harrison is in Central Michigan, which they knew already. That makes Wikivoyage seem like a time-wasting site. If there is a link or an article, I think it should give the reader some information. The idea that having a skeleton article will inspire readers to add to it has (a) been proven wrong in the cases of the articles that I have been redirecting after years of sitting empty, and (b) serves Wikivoyage instead of serving the reader. Ground Zero (talk) 00:28, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I think redirects get handled differently in SEO terms (most readers get here via external web search engines), and the redirect gives the reader a more obvious place to click on a disambiguation page like Harrison. In those two ways, a redirect with approximately no content is better than a non-existent page.

Perhaps more importantly, "the reader looking to see what there is to do in Central Michigan" is not the only reader. The reader trying to figure out how to get to that business meeting in Harrison, Michigan is another use case, and that reader may be helped more by a redirect to the region (makes it easier to find a town about which we do have some information) than by not having a page at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:33, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm not enthusiastic about creating different levels of advice. If this is going to be how we do things, then this is how we do things, and we can write it down without worrying about labels. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:17, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

I can say that there have been times that I have searched for a place or clicked a link that led me to a region article and at times it's downright aggravating (especially when there is a link loop), but I never found it useful. In the Harrison (Michigan) example, if I were the user looking for Harrison, Michigan, I'd want information on Harrison, Michigan. The redirect doesn't help in that regard. Ground Zero's point, though, that leaving the article if it just says "Harrison is in Michigan" would also be useless for me. One says it's in the region, the other just takes you to the region. In terms of ttcf, I would wager neither are very useful for traveler.

Andrewssi2 had proposed without any response aside from a question from me about the bounds of his proposal back in 2015 on the How to Redirect a Page talk page: "I'm suggesting that if an article has really no useful information (and I mean really nothing, just an outline of sections and something like 'Town X is famous for cats') then deletion after a period of time should be an uncontroversial option." What do people think about his proposal? That would save time for editors like Ground Zero and also be better for the travelers (another point made in that discussion). ChubbyWimbus (talk) 11:52, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Changing "don't delete real places" is a different proposal that should be discussed separately. Some people will be strongly opposed. Ii don't have an opinion on this idea, and would like to see the discussion. Ground Zero (talk) 12:18, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I think it is very much connected. The question is what to do with weak outlines. If some of them should be deleted, then those do not need to be redirected. But perhaps you are right that it is better to take that discussion separately anyway – if most people here feel so. –LPfi (talk) 15:56, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I agree that it is connected, but as it is controversial, I am concerned that it might throw this discussion off track. Ground Zero (talk) 19:12, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I have started a separate thread at the bottom of this page. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 20:26, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing, LPfi, ChubbyWimbus, Ground Zero, SHB2000: In case the interested parties missed my comment regarding the deletion proposal above: Wikivoyage:Travellers' pub#Deleting empty outline articles. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 22:52, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

Draft

As I see it the original debate is more-or-less a truce as there are firmly entrenched opinions and neither will give way. All that’s left is draft at User:SelfieCity/Should I merge two pages? based on the comment by WhatamIdoing. If people don’t want it, that’s fine by me, but I think we need to come to consensus whether we want a guideline (and therefore a sort-of consensus) or not. If not I guess it’s the status quo? What happens when there is no consensus in a case such as this one? --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 12:23, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

We can have a guideline or not have a guideline. In the latter case we might have a consensus but at least I am very much unaware of it and I think a guideline would be a nice way to explain it to me. Otherwise I just have to leave those decisions to the people who think they know. –LPfi (talk) 16:02, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

That content could be put into Wikivoyage:How to merge two pages, where it might be easier to find. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:25, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

That’s okay, although it might require restructuring the content. Is the how to merge page a policy, guideline, essay, or none of those? --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 16:49, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I think a guideline is a good idea. Along with Wikivoyage:How to merge two pages, we also have Wikivoyage:How to redirect a page. I don't know which of those pages is better (or if someone thinks there is a completely different option that will work). They are not very different articles. ChubbyWimbus (talk) 11:32, 31 July 2021 (UTC)