Wikipedia:Categorizing redirects

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✔ This page documents an English Wikipedia guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should follow, though it should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss your idea on the talk page.
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This is a Wikipedia guideline for categorizing redirects. It is intended to document current practice and suggest best practice in other areas and indicate where categorization of redirects can be misleading. See also Wikipedia:Redirect#Categories for redirect pages.

[edit] When to categorize a redirect

Most redirects should not be categorized. Examples include misspellings, minor variations of article titles, obscure alternate titles, and abbreviations.

There are some situations where categorizing a redirect is acceptable and can be helpful to users browsing through categories. The following are examples of some of these situations:

  • Alternate names for articles – The primary function of the category system is to allow readers to browse through articles. The category system is often used like an alphabetical index. It is sometimes helpful for redirects from common alternate names to appear in the index list, Editors should consider whether alternate names should be mixed in with other names, or not. Sometimes an entirely new category is more appropriate (see Categorization of multiple taxonomies below). Alternate names should not look out of place on a category page. This is often a way to satisfy disagreements over renaming an article when more than one name seems equally valid. The alternate name(s) becomes a redirect and gets categorized the same way as its target. Another example is when a single article covers things known by multiple names, such as a person who is known in multiple fields of endeavour under different names, a merged article about three different newspapers, or a sketch comedy television show whose name exists on Wikipedia as a redirect to the comedy troupe that created it. In such a case, consideration needs to be given to which title should be reflected in an individual category.
    Examples:
    • Lift bridge redirects to Vertical lift bridge – both are in Category:Bridges
    • The comedy troupe The Vestibules had a radio show called Radio Free Vestibule. Although the article The Vestibules covers both topics and Radio Free Vestibule is a redirect, any radio show categories need to be on the redirect, rather than the main article, so that those category lists correctly display the actual title of the actual radio show.
    • 24 Heures is a French-language newspaper in Montreal, but is covered in the article on its English-language sister publications 24 Hours. However, the French-language newspaper and Montreal newspaper categories must be placed on the redirect, as 24 Hours is not the name of a French-language newspaper published in Montreal, while 24 Heures is. Those categories must contain the correct name of the Montreal publication.
  • Subtopic categorization – Some subtopics of articles have well-known names and, over time, may expand to become separate articles. Many articles cover several topics that have been combined. This can happen following a merge of several related articles. Often there are redirects pointing to these subtopics. These redirects can be categorized. In some cases the categories for the redirects that point to the subtopics will be different than the categories for the entire article.
    Example of similar categorization:
    Examples of different categorization:
  • Categorization of multiple taxonomies – Some articles can be organized by more than one taxonomy. An example of this is the organization of animal and plant articles by common names and binomial name taxonomy. This is possible by categorizing the article one way and categorizing the redirect a different way. In this case, the alternate categorization of the redirect will not appear in the article unless it is manually added.
    Examples:
  • Categorization of list entries – Some well-organized lists have redirects pointing at their subsections. In such cases, categorization of the redirects can be an alternative way of browsing entries in a long list. It can also provide an alphabetical listing for lists that are not organised alphabetically, for example, lists organised in a chronological order. Redirects to sections of minor character lists should generally only be categorized within that fictional setting, and not in the wider fictional categories.
    Examples:

[edit] How to categorize a redirect

A redirect may be categorized in the same way as for any other article. For clarity, all category links should be added at the end of the page, after the redirect statement and any redirect templates.

The redirect will appear in the specified categories but formatted differently than articles (by default, in italics, see Technical Note below).

Example 1
– a redirect to page xxyyzz, using the printworthy redirect template, and in categories aaa and bbb, would look like:

#REDIRECT [[xxyyzz]] {{R printworthy}}
[[Category:aaa]]
[[Category:bbb]]

Example 2
– a redirect to an article subsection with heading 'title' using a link anchor:

#REDIRECT [[xxyyzz#title]] {{R printworthy}}
[[Category:aaa]]

Technical Note: The appearance of a redirect link on category pages and in search results is determined by the CSS class "redirect-in-category" and the specification for that class in MediaWiki:Common.css. By default, this class is set to 'italics', although this may be changed by the user.