Wikidata:Sitelinks to redirects

Sitelinks to redirect pages on client wikis have been requested via a community vote and were made available in October 2022. The main goal of sitelinks to redirect pages is to improve interlanguage links across Wikimedia projects when concepts are described with different granularity in different projects.

Wikipedia articles often cover multiple topics on a single page that are represented by separate Wikidata items. For instance, en:Bonnie and Clyde on English Wikipedia covers the concepts described by the Wikidata items Bonnie and Clyde (Q219937), Bonnie Parker (Q2319886) and Clyde Barrow (Q3320282). Redirect pages on English Wikipedia that are used as sitelinks on Bonnie Parker (Q2319886) and Clyde Barrow (Q3320282) allow users to find the article about the duo and even within the article the section that covers Bonnie Parker (Q2319886) and Clyde Barrow (Q3320282), respectively. Using redirects this way allows the articles such as cs:Bonnie Parker on Czech Wikipedia to have an interlanguage link to the corresponding section in the English Wikipedia article that discusses Bonnie Parker (Q2319886).

Notability

Per Wikidata:Notability, section 1.1, sitelinks to a redirect page do not make an item notable. The item can of course still be made compliant with the notability policy under another criterion.

Also notice each Wikipedia may have their own redirect notability criteria (e.g., reasons to delete redirects in the English Wikipedia).

Using badges to enter a sitelink to a redirect

The bottom green arrow points to the badge selector icon which can be used to add badges. The top red arrow points to the intentional sitelink to redirect (Q70894304) badge.

Sitelink badges menu.

When entering a new sitelink to a redirect this will only be accepted by the system when one of these two sitelink badges is selected to the right of the sitelink before clicking "publish" at the top:

• sitelink to redirect (Q70893996)
• intentional sitelink to redirect (Q70894304)

A badge is selected by clicking on the symbol pointed out by the green arrow in the image to the right. This will open a list of available badges. Preferably select "intentional sitelink to redirect". The redirect badge will now indicate the redirect status of the target page on the client wiki (red arrow).

The purpose of these badges is to highlight sitelinks to redirects in the Wikidata web user interface, and to make them accessible via the Wikidata Query Service. Badge additions and removals are subject to the regular editorial process and do not appear automatically, although the software provides some guidance when editing sitelinks to redirect pages.

The basic sitelink badge sitelink to redirect (Q70893996) is applicable to all sitelinks to redirects, regardless of how the redirect came into use as a sitelink in Wikidata. There are several situations how this can happen unintentionally, e.g. due to a conversion of a regular content page into a redirect page on the client wiki while the page was already used in Wikidata. The community can run bots to manage additions and removals of sitelink badges where these are either missing or not applicable.

When intentionally adding a new sitelink to a redirect page in a Wikidata item, the sitelink should usually be tagged with the badge intentional sitelink to redirect (Q70894304). In most cases for this badge, there is a "Bonnie and Clyde"-like situation of article pages in different projects and the intentional use of redirects should improve the connectivity between wikis. Attempts to add links to redirects without adding a badge automatically fail.

A review of sitelinks with the sitelink to redirect (Q70893996) badge, but without the intentional sitelink to redirect (Q70894304) badge, can be helpful. This can identify wikidata items that should be merged to reflect merged wikipedia articles, or alternatively sitelinks that should be upgraded to the intentional sitelink to redirect (Q70894304) badge if the redirect sitelink is valid and should be kept permanently.

Since intentional sitelink to redirect (Q70894304) is considered a subclass of sitelink to redirect (Q70893996), a sitelink to a redirect should not carry both badges at the same time. If the redirect page is indeed used intentionally and the intentional sitelink to redirect (Q70894304) badge is properly set, the sitelink to redirect (Q70893996) should be removed from the sitelink.

Local policies

Individual Wikimedia projects have their own rules about which redirects they consider to be worthy.

Template:R with Wikidata item

If available on the corresponding Wikimedia project, a template corresponding to Template:R with Wikidata item (Q116644654) should also be added to the redirect page, so that it is visible to users of the Wikimedia project that the redirect has structural utility. For example, the redirect page for Actress on English Wikipedia transcludes en:Template:R with Wikidata item.

Use cases for intentional sitelinks to redirects

Individual entities in a collection of entities

The German Wikipedia article for list of streets and places in Berlin-Halensee (Q1852407) contains explicit information about many streets. One of them is Cicerostraße (Q30076706). It is desirable to be able to find the list article from Cicerostraße (Q30076706) where the street is best described.

Subclasses of entities

human foot (Q25501089) is a subclass of foot (Q15807). foot (Q15807) has an article en:Foot on English Wikipedia in which human foot (Q25501089) is also discussed.

However, given that the article does for instance not discuss chickens' feet, it would be inappropriate to put a sitelink on chicken foot as food (Q41384) to a redirect that leads to foot (Q15807).

History of an entity and the entity

When articles on Wikipedia projects get too long, their "History" section is sometimes split into a separate article. For example, en:History of the Byzantine Empire was split off from en:Byzantine Empire on English Wikipedia, but the history sections of de:Byzantinisches Reich are within that article on German Wikipedia. Adding a redirect to history of the Byzantine Empire (Q2993777) to the section on the German Wikipedia that deals with the history of Byzantine Empire (Q12544) allows the English article on the history to have a sitelink to the German Wikipedia.

Location of an entity and the entity

In many Wikipedias, the country Malta (Q233) and the island Malta (Q193896) have different articles. It is useful to add redirects from Malta (Q193896): island of Malta to Malta (Q233): sovereign state in Southern Europe situated on an archipelago in the Mediterranean Sea for those Wikipedias that do not have a separate item for the island and that discuss the island in their article about the country.

Disambiguation page and family name

Schmidt (Q15240355): family name is a name coming from the German word for the profession blacksmith (Q1639825). Given that multiple concepts share the name, the German and a few other Wikipedias have a separate page for Schmidt (Q18868): Wikimedia disambiguation page. The French Wikipedia has no page for the surname item but lists the people with the surname as part of their disambiguation page on fr:Schmidt. Linking Schmidt (Q15240355): family name with a redirect to fr:Schmidt allows readers to easily find the page via sitelinks from one of the pages linked to Schmidt (Q15240355): family name.

See also: family name has to use a different item than disambiguation page (Q27924673)

Similar disambiguation pages

Wikidata items about disambiguation pages are for pages that share a disambiguation for the same string regardless of the meaning of the string. At the same time, it is sometimes desirable to have sitelinks between disambiguation pages for the same concept that is named differently in different languages. Whether or not those links are desired however depends on the policy of individual Wikipedias.

For instance, Árbol (Q12403097) and Tree (Q3538304) are similar disambiguation pages as they both disambiguate entities that are named after the concept tree. If it would be desired by the English Wikipedia that people could go with sitelinks from es:Árbol (desambiguación) to en:Tree (disambiguation), this sitelink could be created by adding a sitelink on Árbol (Q12403097) that points to the disambiguation page on the English Wikipedia. However, currently such redirects are not welcomed by the redirect policy of English Wikipedia.

Redirects that are unsuitable as sitelinks

Redirects from misspellings or valid alternative spellings of the name of a concept are usually not suitable as sitelinks and thus should not be linked from Wikidata.

Worklists for sitelinks with sitelink to redirect (Q70893996)

Given that sitelinks with the sitelink to redirect (Q70893996)-badge can be mistakenly created by page moves on Wikipedia, we have worklists to clean them up.