TechInfoDepot:Soft redirect

A soft redirect is a replacement of usual or "hard" redirects when the destination is another site. Unlike normal redirects, there is nothing special for soft redirects as wiki pages. It's only that soft redirects are very short pages of which all information is the notification to users, showing the destination in another site to obtain the information they were seeking. The technique is particularly likely to be used when redirecting users across Wikimedia sister projects. — for example TechInfoDepot:Trolling is a soft redirect to What is a troll? 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 foo" message to click, so it would be difficult to return to the redirect page itself; there would also be infinite loop security considerations.)

Soft redirects to non-English language editions of TechInfoDepot should be avoided because they will generally be unhelpful to English-language readers.

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

Category soft redirects
In English TechInfoDepot, categories with the Category redirect template are also called "soft redirects", due to the similarity of interwiki soft redirects. See TechInfoDepot:Categories for discussion for the policy.

Templates
The following templates are used to create a soft redirect link:
 * Soft redirect for all soft redirects except those below;
 * Category redirect for category redirects;
 * Wiktionary redirect or wi for Wiktionary redirects.

Deletion
For purposes of administration, particularly deletion, soft redirects are subject to the same administration processes as regular redirects, and should not be handled by processes that are intended for articles. For deletion this means that soft redirects are subject to R2 - R3 speedy deletion criteria, and are not subject to A1 - A10 speedy deletion criteria. For more deliberative deletion, soft redirects should be handled through TechInfoDepot:Redirects for discussion, and are not subject to either TechInfoDepot:Proposed deletion or TechInfoDepot:Articles for deletion. They are also specifically subject to G8 deletion if their target does not exist, as this has replaced the old R1 criteria.