Disputatio Vicipaediae:Redirectio

Æmilia et Romania

I think we should let the many redirects be ... this Vicipaedia has a disproportionately high number of redirects. There are even many English titles which are redirects to the Latin article. There are even some redirects which are complete nonsense. Just the content of the article tells, which alternate names are allowed. I think this is a good policy, however, as far as I know it has not been discussed before, I deducted it from the actual situation. What do you think? --Roland2 23:27, 26 Maii 2006 (UTC)

I side with UV here...the ligature is strongly discouraged here...the existence of exceptions to this rule might perhaps confuse the wayward wikistumbler.--Ioshus Rocchio 00:26, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

In my view, there are two main problems with the indiscriminate use of redirects:

1. If a redirect (say, A) points to a page (B) and this page is moved (to C), we end up with a “double redirect” (A redirects to B, B redirects to C). While the MediaWiki software allows us to detect double redirects, double redirects will not have the desired behaviour (A will only redirect to B but not to C, see e. g. Usor:Dbmag9/Works-in-Progress/Vicipaedia:Compendia).
2. Links to redirects will be blue, indistinguishable from links to articles. People will not notice the difference between the desired form (e. g. 44 a.C.n. or Formula:Usor en-2) and undesired forms (44 a.C.n, Formula:User en-2, Formula:En-2). In the end, the use of undesired forms might become so common that people might start to create the whole set of redirects for systematic reasons (for all years “a.C.n.” a redirect “a.C.n”; for all babel “Usor” language blocks the forms with “User” and with no prefix, etc.), or people will start creating pages of either form, making it even more difficult to judge which pages exist and which do not, and make category pages more confusing.

On the other hand, redirects are a great means to direct human readers of the encyclopedia looking for information to the right place. So I would strongly advocate the use of redirects for

• common forms or alternate names the user might reasonably type in (e. g. names of persons in their native language/common form).

I would, however, favour the deletion of redirects that are

• complete nonsense,
• of redirects that no reasonable user will type in,
• of redirects that contain spelling errors or other mistakes (except perhaps a very few very common misspellings), and
• of redirects that have an uncommon form (I would not search for or type in 19. saec., would you?)

And as I could not imagine any sane user typing in the ligature Æ, I proposed Æmilia et Romania for deletion.

What is your opinion on this? --UV 00:39, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Another example: Redirects to Decennium 200:

• 2000. (pagina redirectionis) (decennium? century? millennium?)
• 200. dec (pagina redirectionis)
• 200. dec. (pagina redirectionis)
• 200. decennia (pagina redirectionis) (grammar?)
• 200. decennium (pagina redirectionis)

--UV 00:39, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

I have answered there before I read this. ;-) I'd suggest moving the discussion to a page like Vicipaedia:Redirect ... or a Latin aequivalent. --Roland2 00:51, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

I'll make a break ... gute Nacht! --Roland2 01:07, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

sollte ich auch bald machen – letzte Nacht wurde es, wie ich mich ausgeloggt habe und Richtung Bett marschiert bin, gerade schon wieder hell … --UV 01:11, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

(Short summary: It is a good idea to go to bed before the sun rises.)

Apud linguas mihi notas pereginas, sine spe in undis ego submergor profundis germanicae, vos me oro excusare. cfte etiam:

• scacci
• scachi
• scacchi

All of these forms are attested, so makes sense to keep them as redirects, even though the main article is scacci. Likewise I understand the desirability of Washington, D.C. as well as Vasingtonia, C.C. or another ethnic equivalent. I for one, however, feel that we should strongly discourage things like Formula:User instead of Usor, and the use of ligatures. It makes for a sloppy visual, and I think that most real users of this website as a resource would prefer to have things as proper as possible (do those people exist, who read this thing for knowledge? or is it just contributors? how can we find out?). Alot of things specifically like User/Usor can help break the dominance of English, tametsi suppono ut possim similem rem agere latine loquendo =]. Maybe just being too hard, but I think a low level of academically inferior redirects does more of a moral disservice than their existence affords a modicum of comfort to the unfamiliar vagabond. Hem, etiam: Vicipaedia:Redirectio dicam, Rolande.--Ioshus Rocchio 05:43, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

I strongly support each of your points, including your point of having things as proper and as systematic as possible.

On a side note: I believe there must be many people who "read only": Quite a number of people just register an account without ever making a single edit, and I suspect that many more people read anonymously without registering. --UV 14:10, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Double redirects

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If a redirect (say, A) points to a page (B) and this page is moved (to C), we end up with a “double redirect” (A redirects to B, B redirects to C). While the MediaWiki software allows us to detect double redirects, double redirects will not have the desired behaviour (A will only redirect to B but not to C, see e. g. Usor:Dbmag9/Works-in-Progress/Vicipaedia:Compendia).

I think, double redirects are just a temporary problem, since the Gpvosbot automatically fixes them. See its conlationes and Vicipaedia:Bot. --Roland2 11:33, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Avoiding titles like Æmilia et Romania

I think a redirect from Æmilia et Romania to Aemilia et Romania helps to avoid the creation of wrong page titles. If someone uses Æmilia et Romania, he might create that page, if the link is red. In my opinion a doubled page with an unwanted title Æmilia et Romania is worse than having an (unwanted) redirect which makes these unwanted links blue.

With Ioshus Rocchio I've discussed a more extreme solution in the context of Victionary-like-looking entries: Instead of deleting the entries or making a redirect, we could let the page be with a template, that says, that we do not want this title.

At this point I'd like to say that it might be a difference what situation we want to have 300.000 articles later and what we should do now to get there. If we had 300.000 articles and someone gets a red link, when he writes Æmilia et Romania, he might think "Oh, I made a mistake, I'll have to look for the existing article, which deals with Æmilia et Romania.". At the moment he might think "They don't even have an article about Æmilia et Romania. I'll create it." Then his work will be deleted. This might be frustrating. And the deleting needs extra ressources.

Maybe we should distinguish, what we want (300.000 articles later) and what we should actually do to get there. For the next months (?) redirects might help to avoid the creation of unwanted titles.

I know that this policy is different from the policy of other wikipedias. They want to be as perfect as possible at each stage of their evolution, but the straightforward way is not always the best way. We should have a goal in mind, but we should adapt the actual rules to the actual situation. The end justifies the means ... if we are talking about encyclopaedias. ;-) --Roland2 12:10, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

In my view, most people will look for a specific page (using the search function or the category system) before creating a new page, particularly when considering that the naming conventions here on the Latin wikipedia differ greatly from most other languages (e. g. proper names). What do you think? --UV 14:10, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Template for "not wanted" pages

I strongly agree with the suggestion of having a template that lists the page as a non-article that is not wanted as an article, with or without a redirect. I'll have a go at designing something like this. Daniel (☎) 17:30, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Done. It needs a bit more content (once we've decided what to put on it), but here is the draft:

	Haec pagina non informationes habet, et non informationes habeat. Noli informationes haec locare!
	Haec non informationes habeat, quod: Est nomen hominis in lingua domestica. Est nuga. Est forma unica.
	Fortasse est pagina alia quae est de quid voluisti, aut haec aut in Victionarium.

What do you think? Daniel (☎) 17:53, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

I am not really sure where this template could/should be used.

• For undesired pages (not redirects), I would generally favour their deletion, as a link to the undesired page carrying the template will show up in blue and there will be no possibility to distinguish this “bad link” (no information behind the link) from a “good link” (there is an article behind the link). If, however, undesired pages are deleted, a red link will indicate “there is no information here”. Additionally, all references to the undesired page should be removed (Specialis:Whatlinkshere and converting links to plain text).
• Possibly one might use this template on pages that are currently redirects and that should never be converted to an article. Can you think of any example for such a case?

Greetings, --UV 23:08, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

I thought of it as a template to put on redirect pages, with an added reason (includes ligatures, native name spelling etc.). People would see it if they clicked back to the redirect page. It would mainly affect people who wanted to make a new page, or add information to an existing page. Daniel (☎) 08:54, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for adding reasons to the template. Depending on the reasons why we do not want a specific page, we have several options (in addition to just deleting it):

• keep the page with a specific template, e. g. for Zergeisterung, which is a joke
• redirect to a page with an explanation, in cases where we do not need the option to discuss, categorize or link the page with other wikis.

I personally prefer pages over redirects for disputed titles, disputed content, Wiktionary entries, intelligent jokes ... I prefer redirects for misspellings, complete nonsense, silly jokes, ... --Roland2 09:38, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Daniel, thank you for creating the template! This will be very useful for redirects (possibly also for non-redirect pages)! --UV 23:50, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

As far as I can see, extra content put on a redirect page is not seen (not even when the viewer clicks back to it). So this could only be used for non-redirect pages. However, thank you for the good comments! Daniel (☎) 11:36, 29 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Redirecting Æmilia et Romania to "No ligatures here"

What about redirecting "Æmilia et Romania" to a page like "Vicipaedia:Policy about ligatures"? There the user will find our policy and will be asked to correct the wrong link. The redirect "Æmilia et Romania" is not accounted by most statistics. Moreover, it will be annoying to use "Æmilia et Romania", because you always need two clicks. The task of correcting ligatures can be done even by beginners in Latin. It's not bad to have tasks for beginners. --Roland2 12:20, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Problem: For the contributor who creates a link, it is not immediately visible whether he/she picked the right target Aemilia et Romania or the wrong target Æmilia et Romania, as both links will show up in blue. Consequence: The author would have to follow all these links in order to check whether he/she picked the right target or the redirect to “Vicipaedia:Policy about ligatures“. --UV 14:10, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

This will not be a problem when we let resolve redirects by a robot. Moreover: In what situation will a user pick a blue link? I can just imagine the situation when he wants to wikify a term on Page_A and sees the blue link on Page_B. But he can never trust what he sees, because he sees the link title ([[link|title]]), so he has at least to put his mouse over the link. And it might be a "tolerated" variant which is redirected to the target. So he has to click on the link and check the target, if he wants to be sure. It can't neither be the situation that he finds a blue link on Page_A when editing Page_A: It is unusual to link a term twice on a page. Maybe I've missed a constellation ... --Roland2 09:51, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

I agree that this will not be a problem when redirects are resolved by a bot.

Sorry for not explaining my point in clear terms: I was thinking about the situation when a user creates or edits a page. When I create or edit a page, I put the braces [[ ]] around all the terms I would like to create links for, and then I hit “Preview”/“Monstrare praevisum”. Some links will immediately show up in blue, and I do not usually do any further checks on these. I only turn my attention to the links that are still red: I try/preview another synonym, or I search for the appropriate page using the categories or “Search”. If I succeed, I use the correct title for linking; if I do not find the page, I either deliberately create a red link or I remove the braces again if the link is not too important. So, in short: When I create links, I continue retrying/previewing until the link has turned from red to blue. That is why I am so concerned that only “good” links will show up in blue (in my view, that is exactly the purpose the red/blue distinction was made for).

Sorry if I am not explaining my point very well … --UV 23:50, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

You are right, that's a variant, where it is useful to have only "correct" redirects. However, this assumes that you are not realizing that a specific form is unwanted. I assume this will not happen so often if you are one of these careful users you have described above. Maybe I have a better argument: I do not think that an uncorrect link has to be detected immediately. It will be detected when we later (automatically) check the unwanted redirects against used redirects. This can be done using the database dump locally. So we will catch the errors later. Now it's just a question of your percentage of failure, if it's more efficient to detect your 3 % errors later or detect your 80 % errors before saving the page. ;-) I think the point is, that it is sufficient if we have correct links after some days or weeks. I trust the readers that come after you. (In fact I don't really trust them, because then I would not suggest to check the links automaticall after some time ...) My theory is, that this process consumes less ressources (over all) by providing the same result ... after some weeks. --Roland2 15:48, 30 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Creating of masses of redirects

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In the end, the use of undesired forms might become so common that people might start to create the whole set of redirects for systematic reasons (for all years “a.C.n.” a redirect “a.C.n”; for all babel “Usor” language blocks the forms with “User” and with no prefix, etc.), ...

That would be a bad idea ... but we could deal with it. There should not be a redirect from "43 a.C.n" to "43 a.C.n.", but there could be a redirect from "43 a.C.n" to something like "Vicipaedia:How we write years". There could be hundreds of redirects to "Vicipaedia:How we write years". There could be hundreds, but I am confident that we do not need hundreds of redirects. Maybe just dozens ... ;-) --Roland2 12:33, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Same problem as above: For the contributor who creates a link, it is not visible whether he/she picked the right target or the wrong target (a redirect to “Vicipaedia:How we write years“), as both links will show up in blue. Consequence: The author would have to follow all these links in order to check whether he/she picked the right target or the redirect to “Vicipaedia:How we write years”. --UV 14:10, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

As above in 'Redirecting Æmilia et Romania to "No ligatures here"': I cannot see a constellation where a careful user will pick a blue link text without checking anything. However, maybe I have given a bad example with "43 a.C.n": We have such many year numbers that a user has a good chance to guess what's wrong when he gets a red link when linking to "43 a.C.n". Hm ... ok, so we should delete those redirects, where it is obvious what a red link means. Hm ... in what cases is it obvious? ;-) ... and we should delete them just when they are unused, which could be much work. --Roland2 10:02, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Redirects are blue

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Links to redirects will be blue, indistinguishable from links to articles. People will not notice the difference between the desired form (e. g. 44 a.C.n. or Formula:Usor en-2) and undesired forms (44 a.C.n, Formula:User en-2, Formula:En-2).

Yes, that's the one aspect. However, since they are blue, people will not try to create the articles behind these blue links.

Moreover, we cannot assure that a blue link has the correct link text, technically it is possible to write [[Aemilia et Romania|Æmilia et Romania]]. I sometimes do this myself when I am not sure whether a specific spelling is "wrong" or just an alternate form. In that situation I am hoping that successional readers will correct the spelling. I've just corrected the link.

--Roland2 12:43, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Deleting redirects

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Another example: Redirects to Decennium 200:

• 2000. (pagina redirectionis) (decennium? century? millennium?)
• 200. dec (pagina redirectionis)
• 200. dec. (pagina redirectionis)
• 200. decennia (pagina redirectionis) (grammar?)
• 200. decennium (pagina redirectionis)

We should distinguish between:

• What redirects should not be created?
• What (existing) redirects should be deleted?

I agree with you, that many of the redirects we have, should not have been created. However, now, after they have been created, I would not care about the most of them. They might not be useful, but they are harmless and not worth being deleted.

In my opinion, the questions are:

• Which of the existing redirects are worth being deleted?
• Wouldn't it be better to redirect to a help page ("Vicipaedia:Why this redirect is unwanted" or "Vicipaedia:Unwanted page" or "VP:UP" or ...) instead of deleting it?

The advantages of redirecting to a help page:

• Every user can do this.
• Every user can retrace this action.
• I cannot see major disadvantages.

--Roland2 12:58, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Personally, I am of the view that nearly everything that should not have been created in the first place should be deleted. I would like to emphasize that in the context of the question of deleting redirects, I am not speaking about desired redirects (e. g. attested forms, common forms the user might probably type in, and common proper names in their native language). I am speaking of redirects that are nonsense, that contain mistakes (spelling, grammar etc.) or that no reasonable user will probably type in. I even doubt they are completely harmless, as they might encourage other users to create similar undesired redirects.

Redirect to a help page: I do not think this is a good idea, see above. --UV 14:10, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Let's just look at redirects

• that are nonsense
• that contain mistakes (except common misspellings, which are "tolerated" redirects)
• that no reasonable user will probably type in.

They are not desired and I think they shall not be created. I think they might be deleted. However, if we correct the articles where these sort of redirects is used, it is unlikely (per definition) that they are used again, because

• they are nonsense — except "common nonsense" ;-)
• they contain mistakes (except common misspellings, which are "tolerated" redirects)
• no reasonable user will probably type them in.

If they are unused, probably nobody will ever notice them. Ok, they should be cleaned up, but this could be much work for nearly no benefit. I would let them all point to a target saying: "This redirect will be deleted automatically after 12 (?) months given that neither the redirect nor the talk page will be edited until then. Please make this redirect an unused redirect." We need bots ;-) --Roland2 10:22, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

User vs. usor

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Alot of things specifically like User/Usor can help break the dominance of English, tametsi suppono ut possim similem rem agere latine loquendo =]. Maybe just being too hard, but I think a low level of academically inferior redirects does more of a moral disservice than their existence affords a modicum of comfort to the unfamiliar vagabond.

Some time ago I wanted to delete these "Formula:User xx-n", but other users argued that it will be more comfortable for users from other Wikipedias when creating an account here.

I could follow this argumentation because creating a user page and putting the Babel templates into it is one of the first actions a new user will do. So it is good when he will have success.

However, I for example, would maybe support the deactivation of "Category". If someone does not edit the categories when copying from the English Wikipedia, the categories will not work. A red link would signal, that something has to be done with "Category".

Mabe we should have many pages in the Vicipaedia namespace which point the users to our terms:

• Vicipaedia:Category ... content = "Vide [[Vicipaedia:Categoria]]. [[Categoria:Vicipaedia terms in English]]"
• Vicipaedia:Article .... Hmmmmm ;-)

These should not be redirects, because we should categorize these terms.

--Roland2 13:24, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Formula:User …: I admit I would make an exception here, contrary to what I have just stated above, for the reasons you gave and for the reason that this is just one alphabetically closed range of entries in the Formula namespace, not in the article namespace.

Category: The Category: namespace is automatically re-interpreted as Categoria:. This behaviour cannot be turned off in the MediaWiki software.

Greetings, --UV 14:10, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Replacing redirects

(I'll answer later to the answers above, maybe the following clearification will help.)

Although we seem to have different opinions about the handling of redirects, we might share these two points:

• Redirects are handy for searching an article.
• The articles should not link to unwanted titles (even if they are just redirects).

If we had a Vicipaedia:Bot which substitutes a link to a redirection page with the link to the target page: Would it be that what we want? Example:

* Page A: "... [[Page B|bla bla]] ..."
* Page B: "#REDIRECT [[Page C]]"

The bot should edit "Page A" to

* Page A: "... [[Page C|bla bla]] ..."

I asked 2 bot maintainers, if such a bot could be made.

--Roland2 15:15, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

It seems to be possible, see de:Wikipedia_Diskussion:Bots/Archiv#Redirects. The bot will resolve [[Page B]] to [[Page C|Page B]] if there exists a redirect "Page B" => "Page C". --Roland2 19:27, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

I like your idea. In my view, such a bot would allow us to keep a relatively large number of redirects at this time. (We might still decide to delete some of the redirects that are complete nonsense or horribly misspelled, though.)

If (given a redirect A → B) a bot changes [[A|text]] to [[B|text]] and [[A]] to [[B|A]] (not to [[B]], as this will often be incorrect grammatically and might not make sense at all), this would be a solution to my technical concerns. Still, the aspects of uniform presentation to the reader that Ioshus has raised above would remain unsolved.

Even the “Kaon/Meson problem” mentioned on the page you referred to could be tackled with: Redirects that should not be resolved could be marked with a special category [[Categoria:Redirects that should not be resolved]]. The bot should check for the presence of this category and ignore these redirects.

Greetings, --UV 23:08, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. --Roland2 10:24, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Salve! This is what I wrote on Roland2's talk page:

Yes, the solve_disambiguation.py bot can do this (normally it only changes the link, but it can also change the user-visible text if directed to do so). But do you really think this is necessary? I semi-regularly remove double redirects already, and I don't see normal redirects as a problem. I could process a bunch of pages for you, but only if the new target page is more or less definitive, and there are way too many links to the redirect.

I only need a list of the redirects, the bot can easily find out the target. With only little programming, I can make it work with a list of targets instead, or with the category proposal above. On nl:Categorie:Redirect, I've started something similar with categorising redirects, although not really intended for mass-changing of redirects, more for automatic following of some redirects when processing disambiguation pages. My own preference would be that redirects are marked with a template, something like {{r always change}}, which then contains the category. Although it's not really necessary to do it that way, I think it's more flexible. – gpvos (disputatio) 12:47, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

List of redirects in use

I've compiled a (huge) list of redirects in use. You'll find it at

Usor:Roland2/temp3 ... huge: 420 KB !!

--Roland2 18:52, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Categorizing redirects

It is possible to categorize redirects like a regular page. We could put the different types of (wanted?) redirects into different categories, e. g.:

• Type "foreign language to Latin":
  • USA => Civitates Foederatae Americae
  • Deutschland => Germania

• Type "short to long":
  • Antonius => Marcus Antonius
  • Beatrix => Beatrix Nederlandiae Regina
  • Caligula => G. Iulius Caesar Germanicus Caligula

• Type "long to short":
  • Adolf Hitler => Hitler

• Type "different structures":
  • Batavia (Bavaria) => Batavia Bavariae
  • Beatrix (regina Nederlandiae) => Beatrix Nederlandiae Regina

We could then generate a list of uncategorized redirects.

--Roland2 20:58, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Good to know. Still, at the moment I do not see much advantage in categorizing redirects (except for the attention of bots, see above). Or am I missing some point here? --UV 23:08, 27 Maii 2006 (UTC)

If — I say if ;-) — we want to delete all except wanted or tolerated redirects, we should give the reason why a specific redirect should not be deleted. Deletion can then be done ... by a bot ;-) --Roland2 10:29, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

(Shiver) I would not let a bot do the deletion. I still prefer the way where humans have to explicitly determine what to throw out. Otherwise, many unexpected things may occur … --UV 23:50, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Repeat after me: redirects are good (or rather: redirectiones bonae). They don't hurt anyone, and help a lot. There are only two reasons to delete a redirect: 1) its target doesn't exist, and 2) it's completely wrong. – gpvos (disputatio) 18:04, 29 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Chaos or systematics

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I strongly support each of your points, including your point of having things as proper and as systematic as possible.

I prefer systematics over chaos as well, however, the question is, how to deal with that chaos which cannot be avoided. I see several approaches:

• A: remove it immediately when it comes into existance
• B: live with it
• C: mark it as "chaotic" and let it be to a certain extent (or for a certain space of time)

I prefer C, because:

• It needs less ressources than A.
• I don't want to live in chaos (which is B).
• Then we have "living examples" what we mean by "chaos".
• We can handle the chaos, because we have marked it.
• We have the chance to find out that there are several forms of chaos and we have the chance to react specificly.
• We might find out that the chaos will remain static at a certain extent ... sometimes

Example: Categorizing the redirects, see above.

--Roland2 08:33, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

I like this discussion. ;-)

In theory, I prefer A over C and C over B (and, of course, A over B).

In practice, I think, the decisive factor for whether we end up with B or C or A is the amount of effort we wish to invest.

How can we have as much outcome (as much order) as possible for as little effort (as little work invested) as possible? Ideas:

• It is less effort to keep a clean state clean than to clean up a mess. => remove junk immediately the moment it comes in.
• Reduce perturbences: The easier it is to make it correct in the first place (and the difficult it is to make it in undesired ways), the less undesired outcomes will occur. => ensure that our system of categories is logical, ensure that people find the information they are looking for (Roland, thank you for your efforts with creating documentation in the Vicipaedia namespace)!

By the way: I know what living chaos is, I do not need any further examples! ;-)

What do you think? --UV 23:50, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Types of redirects

Maybe we should have some examples ... please add some. --Roland2 08:46, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Action = how to deal with that type:

• K = keep
• R = ressolve (= keep the redirect and replace the link with the target wherever it is used in an article)
• D = delete
• I = ignore
• ? = to be discussed

Type	Action	Examples
01 common forms	K
02 alternate names	K
03 names of people in their native language	R	George Bush
04 complete nonsense	?
05 redirects that no reasonable user will type in	?
06 unkommon spelling errors	?
07 common misspellings	R	Lingua theodisca → Lingua Theodisca
08 uncommon forms	?	19. saec.
09 English redirects (intentionally) in the article namespace for the reader's convenience	K	Help, Intro
10 redirects for titles which are in plural form	K	Vicipaedia:Numerus Romanus, Vicipaedia:Vicimedium , Vicipaedia:Color
11 compendia "VP:xxxxxx"	K	VP:T
12 ligatures	?	Æquatorialis Respublica
13 other cases of a lemma	K	Iunii
99 unknown type (what type?)	?	USA, Deutschland, Bor, Boërosia, Carate, Cat, CC, Centum milia, Civitates Americae Unitae, Et, Finni, Grammatica, Land, Unio rerum publicarum socialisticarum sovieticarum, Uniti Status Americae, Vicipaedia:Community Portal

How do users create new pages?

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In my view, most people will look for a specific page (using the search function or the category system) before creating a new page, particularly when considering that the naming conventions here on the Latin wikipedia differ greatly from most other languages (e. g. proper names).

I'll make a table. --Roland2 09:25, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Ways of cretaing a new page
looking with "Quaerere"
searchin in the categories
searching with "Ire"
clicking on a red link

I think the important point is, what happens, when the user does not find the page. See "Cases when a user does not find a page". --Roland2 09:25, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Cases when a user does not find a page

I'll make a table. --Roland2 09:25, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Case		Comments
the title is correct, but the page has not been written yet	fine!
the page has been deleted before, because we do not want that information	we should not have deleted that page, but put a template on it	Let us distinguish two cases: The page was deleted because the content was inferior. Some day, someone might write a useful article on this topic. => no template! There cannot possibly be any acceptable article on this lemma. => remove any links to this lemma and leave a note on the contributor's discussion page. Do we really need a template here? --UV 23:50, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)
the page has been deleted before, because the title is incorrect	we should not have deleted that page, but put a template on it ... maybe	title that is common and possibly a bit inaccurate, but not wrong => redirect. very common misspelling: de:Vorlage:Falschschreibung (no redirect!, periodically check incoming links) uncommon and wrong => correct any incoming links and delete (In this case, it is improbable that another user will enter exactly the same lemma.) --UV 23:50, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)
the page has been moved to the Victionarium before	we should not have deleted that page, but put a template on it	or just notified the contributor on his talk page? --UV 23:50, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)
the user is a vandal and puts silly content into Wikipedias which do not have that page yet (e. g. Zergeisterung)	we should not have deleted that page, but put a template on it	this will not discourage vandals. --UV 23:50, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)
there exists a page with a similar title but the user did not find it because it was in the "wrong" category	we should improve our categories

The main problems with deleted pages:

• The user does not even know that this page has been intentionally deleted before.
• As a consequence the user does not know the reasons why the page has been deleted.

--Roland2 09:25, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

I agree completely. BTW, I have tried a few times and the software does not like having redirects with content. Whenever I've tried it it just displays whatever the page had before I added the redirect. Very strange. On the topic at hand, I think that the way to go is with a template, giving reasons for the page's information-free state. See above for my attempt at this. Daniel (☎) 10:00, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC)

You (as an administrator) can edit the following messages:

MediaWiki:Noarticletext my bad: the first {{FULLPAGENAME}} (the first one only, the second is alright) should read {{FULLPAGENAMEE}} (You can see the problem here). I do not understand “haec rem”.	default	There is currently no text in this page, you can [[{{ns:special}}:Search/{{PAGENAME}}|search for this page title]] in other pages or [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} edit this page].
	current	Hac in pagina non sunt litterae. Haec pagina forsitan deleta est, vide [{{fullurl:Special:Log|page={{FULLPAGENAMEE}}}} acta deletionum]. Fortasse res cum hoc nomine apud Victionarium [[wikt:{{PAGENAME}}|{{PAGENAME}}]] est. Potes etiam [[Special:Search/{{PAGENAME}}|hanc rem in aliis paginis quaerere]], <span class="plainlinks">[{{fullurl:Special:Log|page={{urlencode:{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}}} acta huius paginae videre] aut [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} hanc paginam creare]</span>.
	proposed	In hac pagina nondum litterae sunt. Haec pagina forsitan deleta est, vide [{{fullurl:{{ns:Special}}:Log|page={{FULLPAGENAME}}}} acta deletionum]. Fortasse Victionario pagina [[wikt:{{PAGENAME}}|{{PAGENAME}}]] est. Potes etiam [[{{ns:special}}:Search/{{PAGENAME}}|hanc rem in aliis paginis quaerere]] aut [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} hanc paginam creare].
MediaWiki:Newarticletext my bad, same as above: {{FULLPAGENAME}} should read {{FULLPAGENAMEE}}	default	You've followed a link to a page that doesn't exist yet. To create the page, start typing in the box below (see the [[{{ns:help}}:Contents|help page]] for more info). If you are here by mistake, just click your browser's '''back''' button.
	current	Per nexum progressus es ad paginam quae nondum exsistit aut iam deleta est, vide [{{fullurl:Special:Log|page={{FULLPAGENAMEE}}}} acta deletionum]. Novam paginam si vis creare, in capsam infra praebitam scribe. Vide [$1 paginam auxilii] si plura cognoscere vis. Si hic es propter errorem, solum '''Retrorsum''' in navigatro tuo preme.
	proposed	Per nexum progressus es ad paginam quae nondum exsistit aut deleta est, vide [{{fullurl:{{ns:Special}}:Log|page={{FULLPAGENAME}}}} acta deletionum]. Novam paginam si vis creare, in capsam infra praebitam scribe. Vide [[{{ns:Project}}:Auxilium pro editione|paginam auxilii]] si plura cognoscere vis. Si hic es propter errorem, solum '''Retrorsum''' in navigatro tuo preme.
MediaWiki:Noimage my bad, same as above: {{FULLPAGENAME}} (both occurrences) should read {{FULLPAGENAMEE}} See e. g. here. please change the second occurrence as well.	default	No file by this name exists, you can $1.
	current	[[:MediaWiki:Noimage]]
	proposed	Fasciculum huius nominis non est, fortasse deleta est, vide [{{fullurl:{{ns:Special}}:Log|page={{FULLPAGENAME}}}} acta deletionum] et [{{fullurl:commons:Special:Log|page={{FULLPAGENAME}}}} acta deletionum Vicimediae Communium]. $1 potes.
MediaWiki:Noimage-linktext “Imaginem”? (This is inserted in place of the “$1” in the message above.)	default	upload it
	current	[[:MediaWiki:Noimage-linktext]]
	proposed	Fasciculum huius nominis onerare

I propose to add a link to [{{fullurl:{{ns:special}}:Log|page={{FULLPAGENAME}}}} index deletionum] to some or all of these messages, and additionally a link to [{{fullurl:commons:Special:Log|page={{FULLPAGENAME}}}} index deletionum] to the last one. I hope my proposals are good Latin, if not, please change them! --UV 23:50, 28 Maii 2006 (UTC), updated 23:58, 2 Iulii 2006 (UTC)

How's that? Changed fasciculum to imago, hope you don't mind. And the way we have been saying "at vicipaedia" or "at victionarium" is not with dative, but with apud and acc.--Ioshus Rocchio 15:23, 3 Iulii 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for correcting! I am always a bit unsure about these things. --UV 21:13, 3 Iulii 2006 (UTC)

Ugh, embarassing mistakes, I apologize. Is it better, now?

--Ioshus Rocchio 21:54, 3 Iulii 2006 (UTC)

Redirects for singular/plural

Proposal:

1. We should set a redirect, when an article has a title in plural form and the user could assume, that the article were in singular form.
2. We should do this for the following namespaces: article namespace, Vicipaedia namespace.

The idea behind this:

1. Titles of articles are generally in singular form.
2. Titles of categories are generally in plural form.

--Roland2 19:16, 31 Maii 2006 (UTC)

Templates for some types of redirects

What about using templates instead of redirects in the following cases:

Alternate names	{{sive|Target page}}?
Better names	{{melior|Target page}}?
Wrong names	{{rectus|Target page}}?

The idea is, to tell the user the reason why he is redirected. --Roland2 21:19, 15 Iulii 2006 (UTC)

Categorizing redirects -- part II

See also #Categorizing_redirects some lines above..

I think we should categorize our redirects. For example:

• is a synonym of ... → Categoria:Cognominata (from verbum cognominatum)
• is a translation of ...
• is a typo of ...
• is a subset of ...
• is an abbreviation for ...
• is a nickname for ...
• is a shortcut for ...
• is a wrong name for ...
• is a bad name for ...
• is an uncommon name for ...
• is a variant of ...
• is a common name for ...
• is something that has any relation with ... the type of relation should be explained in the article
• etc.

Then it would be possible to make some automated checks like:

• Is each synonym mentioned in the target article?
• What redirects are uncategorized? (... and should be deleted, maybe)
• etc.

--Rolandus 13:05, 14 Iulii 2007 (UTC)