How long to keep a category redirect[edit source]

Page says:

"In special cases, such as where an external link leads to the page, you may wish to leave a redirect there - usually for a short time (maybe a week). However, redirects are generally not used in the Category namespace, as someone may add a page to this category, and not be warned by the redlink that it is not a valid category name."

Reasoning doesn't convince me.

1. "where an external link leads to the page" - if you delete the redirect, that external link will lead readers possibly to nothing; their opinion of this site will go down, perhaps irretrievably.
2. "someone may add a page to this category, and not be warned by the redlink that it is not a valid category name" - yes, but someone may be deliberately and with the best of intentions (or just carelessly, not caring what the redness means) adding a new category, not knowing the history. They are not "warned" by the red link, because the responsible ones expect it and the others don't care. They may then look at the category, possibly spend time giving it some text, and give it parent categories. All a waste of time, most of which would be avoided if the Template:Category redirect remained to show that person that the category was wrong and what it should be.

So I recommend leaving the redirect there indefinitely. You may want to arrange for the occasional patrol, based on Category:Appropedia category redirects, to find those that have had things put in them and not corrected. Probably a small price to pay for keeping searchers from other sites contented and getting most of the erroneous categorisations immediately corrected by your more diligent users.

Robin Patterson 05:18, 1 June 2007 (PDT)

Hi All, I resurrected Category:Project because we have had 16 visits, from outside sources, to that page this month. I would like to test Robin's proposed policy. What do you all think about it? --Lonny 10:29, 1 June 2007 (PDT)

Just discovered this (2.5 years late). Are we still concerned about this? I think that as we improve the site navigation, and have landing pages outside category space (main and portal space) then it will be less of a problem. --Chriswaterguy 01:01, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Thinking again, and noticing what looks like a permanent "soft redirect" at wikipedia:Category:Food, I think we could have these in place permanently, but only when we have a system for easily maintaining them, e.g. a bot to regularly move pages to their appropriate categories. I can use a bot command to move pages from a specific category (e.g. "Category:Food" to "Category:Foods", but I wonder if I can do that recursively, i.e. for all categories in Category: Category redirects...

Lonny, sorry for deleting Category:Project - I didn't see your note here or in the edit summary of that page! --Chriswaterguy 02:40, 15 December 2009 (UTC)