Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2013 December 9

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December 9[edit]

This is a list of redirects that have been proposed for deletion or other action on December 9, 2013.

Hoblit, Gregory[edit]

The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more redirects. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the redirect's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was keep. (NAC) Armbrust The Homunculus 19:23, 15 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Are "last name, first name" redirects common on Wikipedia?, because even if Hoblit is not a common name on this site, a disambiguation page should suffice to help with any confusion with this name. The only other another article with this name is Hoblit House. QuasyBoy (talk) 23:57, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Hoblit could be a disambiguation page. The Hoblit House article only mentions Frank Hoblit, so doesn't appear to be a significant factor in discussion of the existing redirect. Peter James (talk) 00:12, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep They don't have to be common to be useful. I know we have some redirects of this form, like Steinbeck, John and Hemingway, Ernest. For what it's worth, I once participated in a discussion on a library listserv where these sorts of redirects were mentioned favorably. Also, this redirect in no way interferes with a potential Hoblit disambiguation page. --BDD (talk) 22:31, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - no WP:RFD#DELETE reason to delete. Harmless and could be helpful. The Whispering Wind (talk) 21:02, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - plausible search term, no argument has been presented for deletion. WilyD 14:37, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep I find this pretty useful and relevant, and in this case I prefer usefulness over commonality. TeleComNasSprVen (talk • contribs) 23:51, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • To elaborate on this idea of a dab, Hoblit House is mostly irrelevant because it's a partial title match unless it can be demonstrated that the house is referred to as "Hoblit" alone. If we had another article on a topic that could reasonably be called Hoblit, such as another person, at that point a dab would probably be in order, since it doesn't seem like Gregory would be a WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. Now that I think about it, I'm going to go ahead and redirect Hoblit to Gregory. --BDD (talk) 23:56, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page.

Heterophobia[edit]

The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more redirects. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the redirect's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was retarget to Homophobia#Heterophobia. (NAC) Armbrust The Homunculus 19:31, 15 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This was originally redirected to Homophobia#Heterophobia, but after a discussion about whether to split it to a separate article, was redirected to the Wiktionary site. The redirect is misleading as it suggests that there's no relevant encyclopedia content, when there is, at Homophobia#Heterophobia, which mentions this ambiguity and also gives context and preferred terms, more than what a dictionary definition provides; this section is a better target for the redirect. Other similar terms (hetrophobia, heterophobic, heterophobe) already redirect to it. The other non-misleading option would be a disambiguation page, but I can't find another article to link to. Peter James (talk) 21:15, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep the current redirect. I did quite a bit of research when the draft article was in TRPoD's sandbox. There seemed to be no cohesive subject. The best we could seem to do was piece together a few marginally related concepts. If this term is legitimately notable in an encyclopedic way, it has not yet been demonstrated. - MrX 22:06, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • It's mentioned there. If that section is removed the redirect can stay how it is, otherwise it is hiding information. Peter James (talk) 23:31, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not sure what you mean by "If that section is removed the redirect can stay how it is". In any case, no information is being hidden. It was deleted and no longer exists. - MrX 23:46, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    It's there - Homophobia#Heterophobia - and has been there for some time (although sometimes with quotation marks around it). The {{Toc limit|3}} means it doesn't appear in the table of contents. Peter James (talk) 23:56, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    OK, I see what you're saying. Yes that content could be used to start an article, but that idea was not favored in the last discussion. - MrX 23:58, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not suggesting that it should be an article, just that if the content exists it should be possible to reach it via the term "heterophobia". Peter James (talk) 00:07, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    I see. I argued for removing the heterophobia content from the homophobia article, since it seemed antithetical. - MrX 00:14, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete/redirect, obviously. This is a no-brainer. As long as we have a section on the topic, the word should direct there. If the section is deleted, then all the variant spellings could be rd'd to Wikt, but as long as the topic's considered significant enough to warrant a section in an article, then that's where people looking up the topic should be directed. — kwami (talk) 00:54, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - Here are the discussions that led to the current redirect: This is not an article about heterophobia and Draft Heterophobia article. - MrX 01:04, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep, leave as it is, the current section discusses the relevant information about heterophobia, which is minimal, little else is needed. Sportfan5000 (talk) 01:18, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • It does, but in the current situation anyone searching for it just by entering the title would only find a redirect to another site, with less information. Peter James (talk) 01:24, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • There is little else to report, heterophobia is a residual of homophobia. it is not pronounced, is not notable, and is important only to a very limited audience that will learn what little there is to offer at homophobia. The rest is redundant to explaining the painfully obvious, this is a made-up phenomena to discredit homophobia in some way. Are heterosexual people killed for loving someone of the opposite sex? OK, next! Sportfan5000 (talk) 01:32, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Retarget to article section in Homophobia, I thought that is where it was already aimed, and my above comments were under that impression. Sportfan5000 (talk) 18:25, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Retarget to article section and I'm surprised that anyone is arguing otherwise. If we have encyclopedic content for a word, the word should go to that content. Our readers are actually expecting and looking for encyclopedic content when they go to a wiki page, and wiktionary offers way less information that the article does. Wiktionary redirects should only be used if there is no actual article content anywhere on Wikipedia. If the section on Heterophobia is ever deleted from the article, then target the wiktionary, but as long as the section's there, the redirect should point to it. Ego White Tray (talk) 15:57, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • To clarify my argument: Heterophobia is a diametrically different topic than homophobia; it lacks scholarly study; and it seems to be of marginal notability, perhaps even fringe. In other words, I don't think there should be a heterophobia section in the homophobia article. I acknowledge that I'm probably fairly alone in that thinking though.- MrX 20:46, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well, that's fine, but it's not a redirect argument, it's a content argument. If this is the crux of your argument, you're arguing in the wrong place. Ego White Tray (talk) 02:18, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The term does seem to have some currency: a Google News search turns up three recent pieces that mention it [1][2] [3]. —rybec 00:58, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • retarget to article section until such time as a fully developed article can be developed. no reason to go cross-wiki when we have a definition on-wiki.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 16:48, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page.

\x22Weird Al\x22 Yankovic[edit]

The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more redirects. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the redirect's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was delete all except those withdrawn during the discussion. WJBscribe (talk) 01:22, 27 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. Following up on Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive257#Mass creation of very improbable redirects, I am nominating all redirects where "unusual" characters (quotes, diacritics, accents, ...) are replaced by "\x" (plus further numbers and letters). It has become clear (at least to most editors involved) that the huge number of pageviews these redirects get are not from humans, but are caused by bots or by errors in the pageviewcounts. These redirects serve no purpose, and considering that there are more than 150 of those and more are created each week, it makes sense to ut a stop to these and delete them. Further creations can possibly be speedy deleted as "implausible recent redirects", but a more formal discussion for such an amount of redirects seemed sensible. This discussion is only about the redirects with the "\x" in them, not about any of the other groups discussed at that AN discussion. Fram (talk) 13:16, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: only the following 150 are nominated here, because it is quite a job to find them (no easy list is available, and they don't show up in searches very well, e.g. AWB can't find them apparently); I intend to speedy delete the other, completely similar ones if this discussion ends in delete.

Extended content

*\xC2\xA9 → Copyright symbol (links to redirect • history • stats)     [ Closure: keep/delete ]

*\xC3\x86 → Æ (links to redirect • history • stats)     [ Closure: keep/delete ]

The evidence that these requests don't come from humans seems to consist of:

  1. this is an incorrect or unsupported encoding
  2. these appear on WP:TOPRED
  3. the 12 May 2013 WP:TOPRED had no "\x" items
  4. stats.grok.se always shows zero views for pages containing "\x"
  5. some of these receive more views than the properly encoded name

The article mojibake explains how mangling of text can happen. It is a commonplace when using a computer to work with text.

I looked at the earliest available WP:TOPRED, from 2 February 2013. It has several "\x" entries. I don't know why the 12 May report has none, but the phenomenon did not begin in June.

I downloaded the hourly page-view logs for 18 November and the first hour of 19 November. Searching for "\x" requests to the English Wikipedia, I found (zcat *gz | grep ^en\ | grep "\\\\x" | cut -f2 -d\ | sort -u | wc -l) 114,244 unique page names containing "\x" had been requested. Most of them got one request in any given hour.

Many of the redirects in this nomination were created in response to WP:TOPRED, which lists nonexistent pages which receive many requests. While it's possible for a malicious or malfunctioning bot to generate numerous requests, it's plausible that many people are interested in topics such as the 2013 French Open, Beyoncé Knowles, Weird Al Yankovic, or the copyright symbol. The fact that stats.grok.se ignores these requests doesn't mean they're harmful; it's just an error in the programming of that site. If most of the requests for an article use a supported encoding rather than the "\x" encoding, the article is unlikely to appear on the TOPRED list. Hence there's a bias toward creating redirects to articles which are requested with the "\x" encoding more often than with a supported encoding.

As suggested in June [4] if the Mediawiki software would transform "\x" to "%" there would be no need for these redirects. In the meantime, they serve to make it easier to reach the most-requested articles, a tiny proportion (on the order of 0.1%) of the pages that are requested this way. This week's TOPRED list has 20 "\x" entries; that number is tiny compared to 114,424. These are not being created en masse. Requests that have been happening at least since February and possibly much longer, and which happen over 100,000 times a day, are not "improbable".

While the exact software that causes them is unknown, I see no solid evidence that requests containing "\x", or the requests for these particular pages, are by bots or crawlers, let alone harmful or malfunctioning bots or crawlers. —rybec 21:53, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep I suspect these topics end up on TOPRED due to external links. I agree that it would be good if we could fix the MediaWiki software and bypass the issue altogether, but as it stands, we have tangible evidence (in TOPRED) that these redirects are useful, with only some editors' "That can't be right!" gut feelings against. Thanks to rybec for the notification, by the way; it would've been nice to hear from the nominator. --BDD (talk) 22:26, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've just notified BDD, Nabla, Sun Creator, Trivialist, and Anthony Appleyard ‎of this deletion discussion. —rybec 22:27, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Arbitrary section break[edit]

I looked at more log files and found

  • no "\x" requests in pagecounts-20071209-190000.gz
  • no "\x" requests in pagecounts-20101209-180000.gz
  • one "\x" request in pagecounts-20110909-190000.gz (commons.m File:\x22_Delphinidae,_Península_Yucatan,_Mexico_\x22_.jpg 1 9611)
  • 55 lines about "\x" requests in pagecounts-20120228-190000.gz (including a request for \x22Weird_Al\x22_Yankovic on the English Wikipedia)
  • 342 lines about "\x" requests in pagecounts-20120609-190000.gz
  • 4,647,204 lines about "\x" requests in the logs for the 25-hour period from 0:00 on 18 November 2013 until 01:00 on 19 November (zcat pagecounts-2013111*gz | grep "\\\\x" | wc -l)

The logs are hourly: the presence of a line in the logs means there was at least one request for a particular page over the course of that hour.

From the above, I see that this traffic goes back at least as far as 2011, but has increasted drastically since 2011. That makes old versions of Internet Explorer unlikely as the source of it. I had invited someone from the WMF analytics team to look at the AN discussion, but didn't see a comment from him. —rybec 00:40, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Rybec, we have "tangible evidence" that these redirects are not used by humans at all, as evidenced in the discussion linked. Some of these \x redirects have had ten times more supposed pageviews than their target did, and the creation of the redirect did not cause any increase in views for the target. And traffic to Commons is hardly relevant for redirects on enwiki anyway... Fram (talk) 08:07, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The pageview logs are for various WMF projects, including Commons. The first request I found was to Commons, so I mentioned it to establish the beginnings of this traffic.
I've already addressed the comment about redirects getting more traffic than their targets. Creation from WP:TOPRED favours pages that are normally accessed through a broken URL.
As I understand it, requests that go to a redirect page are logged as just that: they don't get logged as requests for the redirect's target.
Anyway I've reported this as bugzilla:58316. As I noted there, the "\x" encoding looks like Javascript escape sequences. —rybec 08:39, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Which doesn't explain why suddenly these redirect pages would get ten times the amount of traffic they received before this all happend in earnest. Whta would make these pages suddenly so very popular? Fram (talk) 08:58, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It's popular because an automated bot retries when finding it has a page not found error. My guess is that it's Googlebot, bingbot or similar which doesn't handle diacritics, en-dashes etc. correctly. After many days of the redirect existing the attempts to view go down which is consistent with Googlebot activity over not found pages. Regards, Sun Creator(talk) 20:15, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think we should hold a general moratorium on these redirects, discourage creation of new such redirects without deleting existing ones. (Although for this particular batch of \x articles I'm leaning in favor of delete for the time now.) Because have you considered what would happen were the bug request to go through? Would that make these articles irrelevant, since everything would bypass them and get auto-hard-redirected via URL to their respective pages anyway? Or would that simply break these existing redirects and inflate the page count, and then require all the administrators to go back and delete all these redirects so that the fix works properly when it is implemented? TeleComNasSprVen (talk • contribs) 10:27, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

These redirects would become inaccessible; the Wikimedia software would decode the URLs automatically as it does now when people request Robinson_Canó (Robinson_Can%C3%B3) when they want the Robinson_Canó article. Robinson_Can\xC3\xB3 would be decoded in the same way. The page view logs would continue to have separate entries for the three different encodings. —rybec 20:02, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Very strong Delete. This is the second mess created by WP:TOPRED. I have added a stronger worded warning at the top to stop people mass creating silly redirects without first gaining consensus. John Vandenberg (chat) 02:35, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    FYI I have also started a policy discussion at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#Non-human_typo_redirect. John Vandenberg (chat) 02:49, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete all, confusing mojibake redirects that only seem to serve bots. If any humans have used them, could they come forward please? —Kusma (t·c) 13:33, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's what I wonder as well. Above, it is said that there were 4,647,204 requests for pages with the \x string in 25 hours. That's what, 100 million per month? And yet none of these found teir way to any noticeboard or created the redirect? Even if only 1 in a million failed searches and redlink arrivals resulted in some action (complaint, redirect, duplicate article creation, whatever), it should be quite easy to find traces of this. But so far, the only thing that has happened is that people who noticed these on TOPRED created redirects. It seems highly unlikely that these were really human searches. Fram (talk) 13:45, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Do you really think readers who have used these would realize that they had, much less know about RfD? --BDD (talk) 17:22, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I expect all readers who used these know about RfD. The creators know about RfD, and I do not think there are genuine users, so all of those know about RfD by default. —Kusma (t·c) 19:49, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think that readers who have used these search strings before the redirects were created would realize that they had, yes. At least some of them would wonder why they didn't arrive at their destination, or why at first glance Wikipedia didn't have an article on e.g. Beyoncé. My argument is not about anything after the creation of these redirects, including RfD, but before the creation. Fram (talk) 10:33, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all until the software is fixed. We have evidence that these are used, but no evidence as to who uses them so arguments such as Kusma's "I do not think there are genuine users" are completely unverifiable. There is no evidence presented that keeping these redirects harms the encyclopaedia, whereas enabling people to find the article they are looking for clearly benefits the project. Thryduulf (talk) 14:19, 15 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Keeping these encourages the creation of more of these useless monstrosities, which does harm the encyclopedia. I would argue that teaching people to use the search function by serving them with a "not found" notice benefits the project more than sending them to their intended page no matter how garbled their request is. —Kusma (t·c) 10:28, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Creating redirects we have evidence of desire for is a Good Thing. Wikipedia exists for the readers, deliberately inconveniencing them is something that should be stomped on forcefully and repeatedly until editors get the message. Thryduulf (talk) 11:15, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    There seems to be zero evidence of human desire for these redirects. —Kusma (t·c) 11:56, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Not quite. There is evidence of desire, but no evidence of whether that desire is from humans, software, humans using software, or a combination of these. In the absence of evidence that none of the hits are from human readers, we cannot assume that. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Thryduulf (talk) 12:04, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    True, but absence of evidence can be a strong indicator of absence, and this seems to be the case here. I can't, like your link states, prove that none of these pageviews are by humans, but I can conclude that it is very unlikely that the vast majority of these hits are made by humans. There is no evidence, beyond the bare statistics (and you now what they say about statistics) that there is a real problem that these redirects are trying to solve. Fram (talk) 12:20, 16 December 2013 (UTC) quests[reply]
    All we know for certain is that here is a very large number of requests for these page titles. We can either serve the pages they are looking for or not. Providing the encyclopaedic information that people are looking for is Wikipedia's primary purpose. Despite assertions to the contrary there isno evidence that havintes redirects harmsteh encyclopaedia in any way, so thereis no legitmate reason to delete them. Thryduulf (talk) 13:41, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    From above: "114,244 unique page names containing "\x" had been requested." I don't think it would be wise to create these, without any evidence that people are actually looking for any of these hundred thousand page titles. And if we don't plan to create these, then keeping a few hundred around is rather useless and arbitrary as well. But I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this on (before people start complaining that I'm badgering the opposes :-) )Fram (talk) 18:08, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all per Thryduulf. These redirects are only temporary anyway, so there's very little need to delete them. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 05:22, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • In what way are they temporary? Do you mean "because the software will be fixed soon"? Let's hope so... Do you agree with a speedy deletion after the software has been fixed then? Or would you prefer a new discussion at that time? Fram (talk) 08:22, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Unless there's something I'm missing here, after the software is fixed these redirects will be unnecessary. The software itself will automatically redirect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/\x22Weird_Al\x22_Yankovic (for example) to the correct article without the need for a "manual" redirect (for lack of a better term). I would think these redirects could then be speedy deleted under WP:IAR. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 20:08, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I wasn't completely sure what you meant, now I am. Fram (talk) 20:57, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
IAR is never a suitable rationale for speedy deletion. It is likely that when the software is fixed these redirects will be almost impossible to access, so a G6 speedy deletion immediately before the system goes live would be appropriate I think. 21:48, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
I forgot about G6, no need to invoke IAR. I would say that IAR is almost never a suitable rationale for speedy deletion. A huge part of the point of IAR is that there are unforeseeable and extreme circumstances that the rules can't be experted to cover, so I wouldn't say never. There is probably some set of circumstances that would justify an IAR speedy deletion, even if such circumstances would be extremely rare (as in so rare it's never came up). Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 22:16, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • delete all such redirects. We should not be creating redirects to solve problems in encoding elsewhere on the web, as it means a maintenance mess if any such pages move or are merged, redirected, etc. Redirects are cheap but they're not free, and this is not a good use of our time or resources.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 17:00, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete all such redirects. We simply don't need to fix encoding errors for entire Internet. You'll have to wait for any software "fix" forever, as no software can possible determine if "\x22" means literal "\x22" or something else encoded as "\x22" by some arbitrary encoding scheme. While we wait forever, User:Anthony Appleyard will create more of this utterly useless crap. jni (talk) 18:10, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete It seems unlikely these are being used by humans, and as Jni says, it's not worth running around trying to cater to everyone's broken software. Siuenti (talk) 21:08, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • At User:Rybec/backslash-x-titles I've uploaded a list of pages with "\x" in the title. —rybec 21:30, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • When deleting these links it would be easier to go through the old history of User:West.andrew.g/Popular redlinks and look for the blue links. I did not make all these links :: for example, of the redirects listed in User:Rybec/backslash-x-titles, the redirect Repouss\xC3\xA9 and chasing was created at 11:10, 23 June 2013‎ by someone else, and \xC2\xA9 (to the copyright symbol) in the list hereinabove was created at 06:04, 13 November 2013‎ by someone else. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 21:53, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep all per Thryduulf. As the creator of one of these, I can attest there is human interest. All redirects I create are derived from personally having tried to find something at a title I found reasonable, and failing. In this case, it was likely due to coming across that code and wishing to get to the article about the symbol even though (in fact, precisely because) I didn't know what it referred to. Also, I fail to see what harm these redirects cause the encyclopedia. --Waldir talk 22:59, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • The one you created is not one of these. You created \xB0, which is in itself a Hex symbol, and therefor an acceptable redirect. The ones I nominated (not rybec, who expanded this with your redirect which should never have come under scrutiny) are normal text with one or two hex symbols insesrted in the place of diacritics or unusual characters (hyphens and the like). Yours was a human creation of a reasonable redirect, no one came personally across the ones I nominated though. Fram (talk) 08:28, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
      • You are right, but the "Extended content" area above also has entries for \xC2\xA9 and \xC3\x86 that are close to what Waldir created. Maybe we could exclude all such single or two character sequences that redirect to individual characters or symbols from this discussion? They are totally different than redirects like Charcot\xE2\x80\x93Marie\xE2\x80\x93Tooth disease that "serve" only broken web spiders. ("serve" is in scary quotes here because you cannot really make any sane assumptions about arbitrary, unknown and clearly buggy SW that is indexing WP in some arbitrary, broken and unknown ways). jni (talk) 09:07, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
        • Yes, I perhaps shouldn't have included those in hindsight. I have no objection against keeping those that consist solely of Hew symbols for single things (characters, symbols, ...), but would oppose series of hex symbols that form words (I don't think we have any of those now). Fram (talk) 09:50, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
          • Agreed. If those consisting of hex codes for a single symbol are kept, I would support deleting the others, but only after the software is fixed to deal with broken tools (some of which could well be user-facing ones), per Emmette Hernandez Coleman, and because I still fail to see the harm these redirects cause. However, I don't feel strongly about that, so I'll change to Weak keep. --Waldir talk 14:56, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Please, please, let us not set a precedent of formalizing support in our database for other people's corrupt data. That is a dark, bad road to embark upon. — Scott • talk 11:02, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete From what has been discussed, my personal opinion is that encoding errors shouldn't have redirects unless it is an article about that character(s) that renders differently (which having those redirect to what character it should be could prove useful). We have thousands (probably more) of articles with diacritics, en-dashes and etc. and probably a lot of ways that it could be rendered through error and \x is just one of the ways. I don't think we need to go down the road of creating lots of redirects based on these errors, especially when more and more errors crop up and we have a ton of useless redirects. Regards, — Moe Epsilon 14:34, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Arbitrary section break 2[edit]

I've just notified some more editors who contributed redirects with "\x" in the title, namely:

Could this be left open a little longer, to allow them to reply? —rybec 23:55, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am involved, but that shouldn't be a problem. The 7 days thing is a guideline, not a hard an fast rule. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 00:18, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • What would get this junk out of the incoming-redlink list is to update Wikipedia's incoming link handling software thus:
    1. If the page exists, then well, else:
    2. If the page's name contains any \x , replace them with % and try again. If still not found:
    3. Remove any final m or n or p and try again.
    • Anthony Appleyard (talk) 06:25, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • Remove any final m or n or p and try again. and what if someone starts to crawl redlinks that end with x, th, xyz, or abracadabra? When will the processing of nonsense stop in your opinion? All DDOS attackers take note: if this gets implemented, then you can access redlinks like \x20\x45\x34\343\x3423\x20n to maximize the server load of incoming-redlink handling. jni (talk) 07:42, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • There is likely some specific server software fault that in error treats an "end of string" character as part of the text string, and/or adds 1 to the "how many characters in this string" counter. Here, this adds m or n or occasionally p, and nothing else. I have written software and I know how errors can creep into software programming. Step #3 above would naturally be tried once only per access request. If the verdict of this discussion is "delete all \x to % redirects", I will help to delete what of them that I can find. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 07:57, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@User:Rybec if you start biasing this discussion by inviting people who have added this junk to WP, then this indeed must be open for a longer time. I will start inviting my deletionist cronies here as well. (Or any people with some common sense will do.) jni (talk) 07:42, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@Jni:: the instructions for this forum say "It is generally considered civil to notify the good-faith creator and any main contributors of the redirect that you are nominating the redirect." Since the nominator appears to have failed to notify any of the creators, I have done so. —rybec 08:03, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Including creators of redirects not even up for deletion, like User:Waldir above, who votes to delete all because he created one for a Hex symbol, while none of the others I nominated are Hex symbols, but are normal text with a Hex symbol included. Nice way to totally derail and votestack a discussion, Rybec. All the creators of the redirects I nominated for deletion were notified of the preceding AN discussion, which included my intent to delete these and the reasons for doing this anyway. Fram (talk) 08:31, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The second item on Fram's list is \xC2\xA9, a redirect to the copyright symbol created by me. Waldir made \xB0, a redirect to the degree symbol. Fram stated "I am nominating all redirects where "unusual" characters (quotes, diacritics, accents, ...) are replaced by "\x" (plus further numbers and letters). [...] Note: only the following 150 are nominated here, because it is quite a job to find them (no easy list is available, and they don't show up in searches very well, e.g. AWB can't find them apparently); I intend to speedy delete the other, completely similar ones if this discussion ends in delete." That he meant to include \xC2\xA9 was apparent; that he intended to preserve \xB0 was not "B0" looks like further numbers and letters to me, just as surely as "C2A9". What, pray tell, is the essential difference between the escape sequences for the copyright and degree sybmols? I've provided a list of all pages which contained "\x" in their title, as of 23 December. Perhaps Fram would care to peruse it and provide the list of those--if indeed there are any besides Waldir's--which he wants kept? Or alternatively, the specific list of those he wishes deleted.

Fram did indeed inform several people of the AN discussion, but he didn't leave a link there when starting this new discussion. I found out about this RfD through my watch-list. Now Fram tells me that improperly notifying people is "vote-stacking"...okay, if we were voting. We're not, so how is Waldir's comment invalid? Is there an actual rebuttal to it besides the assertion that Waldir should not have been notified? —rybec 09:47, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Waldir seems to be making a faulty generalization by argumenting keep for individual hex character redirects and inferring "keep" to whole class of encoding errors. From the fact that encyclopedia needs to explain alternative forms and encodings for £ or whatever, it simply does not follow that we must keep 1983\xE2\x80\x931985 famine in Ethiopia or hundreds of other corruptions like that. The distinction should be patently obvious by now for anyone following this discussion. jni (talk) 10:47, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Jni informed me (and I replied since) that I had included a few similar ones to the one Waldir created in my initial list, which of course seriously undermines my argument. In my reply (in section break 1 above), I indicated that my intention is to get rid of all the ones except those that represent a single symbol or character. Is it acceptable to you (plural) that I withdraw my nomination of \xC2\xA9 and \xC3\x86, make an additional comment here below that I am doing so and that my proposal does not include such redirects, or do you prefer me to handle this in a different way. In any case, my apologies to Rybec, I had wrongly concluded that he tried to influence the discussion in his preferred direction by including redirects which were not under threat of deletion, but my own nomination contained similar ones and so his inclusion of User:Waldir in his notifications was perfectly appropriate. Fram (talk) 11:04, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Arbitrary section break 3[edit]

I have withdrawn the nominations of \xC2\xA9 and \xC3\x86, and want to make clear that this nomination/precedent is not intended to include redirects from Hex codes to single symbols or characters, which are distinct from the main issue this RfD is about, which are "normal" text with some incorrectly rendered characters / diacritics / ... included. I would again like to apologize to Rybec for my comments above, I was wrong. Fram (talk) 12:54, 18 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete all As I said at the AN discussion, experience shows that any server on the Internet will receive countless bogus requests from people experimenting with spambots, broken systems, and trolls. Creating redirects for these is a massive misunderstanding of what is helpful for the encyclopedia. The best way to let everyone know that the party is over (do not create any more) is to delete all. Johnuniq (talk) 06:42, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Seriously... if I had reconfigured my webserver to silently accommodate all the bizarre failed requests I've seen in my error logs over the years, I'd have the largest rewrite engine configuration in the world, and the job of updating it would never stop. I can't believe we're debating this, to be honest - it's Not Our Problem. — Scott • talk 11:39, 19 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete all - @Rybec: thanks for contacting me about this. I created some of these because I thought it solved a problem and prior to finding any discussion about it. I support the comments of West.andrew.g. - tucoxn\talk 17:08, 21 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete all. I created one of these out of West.andrew.g's nice redlinks list. Soon after I noticed the oh-so-many \xHH links, so I stopped adding those. I notice West.andrew.g already has taken measures to keep those out of his list, great, thanks you. I think that if WP ever wants those redirects to exist, it should be implemented in the code that looks up page's name (I doubt it is a good idea, but it surely looks better than potentially creating many millions of such redirects) - Nabla (talk) 20:36, 26 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page.

Fairy Guy[edit]

The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more redirects. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the redirect's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was delete. --BDD (talk) 17:11, 16 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There is no such name as Fairy Guy to be premiering in the Season 12 of Family Guy, or in the future seasons, as it was just created because they announced it on Comic Con, but was never official. I recommend that the redirected article should be removed. Blurred Lines 11:49, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete: Even if this was an official character that was going to be added to the show, I'm not sure that it should be a redirect to Family Guy (season 12). Fairy Guy seems like a general enough term (not to mention close enough to the slang term for a gay man) that people searching for it probably wouldn't have necessarily been looking for the character. --Jpcase (talk) 23:09, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page.

Nokia 800[edit]

The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more redirects. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the redirect's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was dabify. (NAC) Armbrust The Homunculus 19:48, 15 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No one uses "Nokia 800", you always specify the "Lumia" keyword. More over no other pages use this title. So better delete the redirect page. Compfreak7 (talk) 10:13, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Disambiguate: the term is used for the Lumia mobile phone in several articles on engadget.com, for instance one is titled "Nokia 800 and Acer M310 caught on Windows Phone dev's stats, likely in testing" and another "Nokia 800 gets pictured, ready for its close-up". Also this Swedish article uses the term for the Nokia N800 tablet computer. I'm unsure whether people might be searching for the phone, or the tablet. —rybec 01:11, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Disambiguate per Rybec. Thryduulf (talk) 14:10, 15 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page.

Debut album[edit]

The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more redirects. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the redirect's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was delete. WJBscribe (talk) 00:33, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Per WP:R#DELETE #10. No mention of the term on redirected article. Musdan77 (talk) 06:22, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Keep WP:R#KEEP #4: ~1500 pages currently link to debut album. Chris857 (talk) 14:36, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, no information at target. It's a pity that so many pages are wasting users' time but perhaps that can be fixed with a bot. Siuenti (talk) 18:10, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per WP:REDLINK. It's very likely that a reader searching for "debut album" already knows what an album is. This type of redirect is condescending. --BDD (talk) 22:28, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per BDD. —Kusma (t·c) 19:51, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page.

Sophomore album[edit]

The following is an archived discussion concerning one or more redirects. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on an appropriate discussion page (such as the redirect's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.
The result of the discussion was delete. WJBscribe (talk) 00:33, 17 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Per WP:R#DELETE #10. No mention of the term on redirected article. Musdan77 (talk) 06:20, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete, no information at target, a wild-goose chase. Siuenti (talk) 18:11, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete per WP:REDLINK. It's very likely that a reader searching for "sophomore album" already knows what an album is. This type of redirect is condescending. --BDD (talk) 22:29, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page.
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