Fallout Wiki:The Vault Academy/Advanced editing/Lesson eight

Redirects[]

Sometimes when you click a link, you will see that you have been redirected to an article that has a different name than the link you clicked. This is because the article has moved, or does not have its own, and the link was not fixed to reflect the change. When you click on this tiny link "redirected from" you will arrive at the redirect page, which shows you where it started and where it is headed to.

Anyone can redirect a page to another, no rights or special roles are required, and although it is a simple process to do, there are a lot of steps afterward that need to be done to keep the wiki tidy. Although relying on redirects technically works, we should not rely on it, so there are tools we can use to make sure all links are pointing to the appropriate article. For starters, the way to redirect a page to another is accomplished by clearing the page of content, and adding the following:

#REDIRECT [["Excavator suit" - Final steps]]

At this point, if you click "show preview" all you will see is the redirect, showing where the destination will be after an arrow. All redirects can be found via the ListRedirects tool. After a merge, instead of deleting the page that was merged into another, we will instead leave a redirect pointing to the new page. Remember to also redirect the merged article's talk page, found by searching for Talk:(name of merged article).

What Really Links Here[]

This gagdet can be turned on via preferences, see here.

At the very bottom of the redirect page is an option to see all the articles that use this redirect. Part of cleaning up a redirect is changing all of these articles to point to the correct page. Once this is complete, refresh the redirect page and it will disappear. If you redirect a page, it is your responsibility to do the steps of fixing the links.

You will see two tools, what links here and what really links here. The "what links here" version had a lot of glitches, and due to my incessant complaining, genius Nukapedian Eckserah wrote a brand new gadget called what really links here. You really only need this one, though, which also has the redirects at the bottom and can be used to search for parts of links or keywords.

Empty redirects[]

When all of the links have been fixed, the redirect will show that no pages link anymore. Hooray! We will leave this redirect as-is, even if it is empty, and not delete it. Just in case someone attempts to use it in the future. I would rather someone enters a redirect than a red link. And if someone tries to make a new page that has already been redirected, they can see this and we can avoid redundancy.

Quiz[]

Follow the image below to take the quiz.