Soft redirect

This article has been adapted from Wikipedia:Soft redirect and Help:Redirect on the English Wikipedia. The English pages have been translated in other languages. When editing or translating this page, consider referring to/ synchronizing with the current versions listed on Wikidata: Wikipedia:Soft redirect and Help:Redirect.

A soft redirect or interwiki redirect is a replacement of usual or "hard" redirects that is usually used where the linked destination is another website — including other Wikimedia projects. Soft redirects differ from ordinary redirects in that they lead to a special redirect page first, requiring the user to click through to the redirected link again as opposed to automatically taking them there.

Unlike normal redirects, a soft redirect is not a functionality of the wiki software. It is merely a page with a notification to users, that they will be taken to another website when clicking on the link being offered.

The technique is particularly likely to be used when redirecting users across different Wikimedia sister projects. Normal redirects would be undesirable in these circumstances, and hard interwiki redirects are disabled. (Reasons: they could not be easily edited without hand-crafting the correct URL, since clicking on a link to the redirect page would take you straight to the redirect's target and there would be no "Redirected from ..." message to click, in order to return to the redirect page itself; there would also be infinite loop security considerations.)

Example:

• "What links here" is a hard redirect to "Help:What links here". This is indicated by the small notice "(Redirected from What links here)" on the top left of the target page.
• At the same time the target page "Help:What links here" in itself is a soft redirect to the target "mw:Help:What links here" on MediaWiki.org.

Soft redirects between different languages should be avoided because they will generally be unhelpful to readers unfamiliar with the destination language.

Soft redirects are intended mostly to point to external websites, where hard redirects will not function. For internal use in general, hard redirects should be used instead.

Another situation where soft redirects are used is when the intended target is a special page, and the system automatically "softens" attempted hard redirects to special pages. For example, en:Wikipedia:List of tags redirects to en:Special:Tags.

In some projects such as English Wikipedia, a notion similar to the original interwiki soft redirect is applied to categories, and they are also called "soft redirects." See for example w:en:Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion#Redirecting_categories.

• Meta-Wiki: {{Interwiki redirect}}
• MediaWiki: {{Interwiki redirect}}
• Wikimedia Commons: {{Softredirect}}
• Wikidata: {{Softredirect}}
• Wikimedia Incubator: {{Soft redirect}}
• Wikipedia: {{Soft redirect}}
• Wiktionary: {{Softredirect}}
• Wikisource: {{Softredirect}}
• Wikibooks: {{Softredirect}}
• Wikiquote: {{Softredirect}}
• Wikinews: {{Softredirect}}
• Wikispecies: {{Softredirect}}
• Wikiversity: {{Softredirect}}
• Wikivoyage: {{Soft redirect}}