User:Tamzin/Quotation mark redirect deletion philosophy

I'm one of a few users who have taken an interest in redirects with quotation marks in their title. When !voting in RFDs for them, or determining whether to send one to RFD myself, this is my philosophy. This is not an essay, and certainly not an attempt at creating policy; just writing up my views in a centralized place rather than having to repeat them every time.

First, we consider multi-word titles, which we approach quotation mark redirects from a presumption of harmfulness. This is because they shadow an important search feature: "exact title matching", an important feature with multi-word search terms. Because of said shadowing, high pageviews are seen as a negative, or at best as equivocal.

Thus I support keeping such redirects only under the following circumstances:

1. The redirect's target itself is rendered in quotation marks, or sometimes is stylized with them. (This is not the same as topics frequently set in quotation marks when referred to.)
2. Or the redirect's history contains content required for attribution.
3. Or the redirect has pageviews so exceptionally high that they must be coming from an external link rather than failed attempts at exact-title-match serach. This will rarely, if ever, be the case.

For single-word titles, I ask the following questions:

1. Is the redirect the result of a pagemove, where it existed at the original title for <24h? Delete unless it gets an exceptionally large number of pageviews.
2. Is the target page about a word, a creative work of some kind, a corporate entity in the former USSR, or any other thing frequently set in quotation marks? Keep
3. Is the redirect more than 10 years old? Keep
4. Does the redirect get more than 50 pageviews in the preceding calendar year, or more than 250 in the preceding five calendar years? Keep
5. Otherwise: Delete

Obviously, common-sense exceptions apply. This does not claim to be an exhaustive set of criteria.

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