All The Tropes:Creating New Redirects

You have a page for a trope or work, and the name seems to be fine, especially if it's an established term. But it's still kind of obscure outside of that particular Fandom or the entertainment industry in general, it has accented characters and/or it's hard to spell. Or maybe it's had more than one name over the years. So it's not that likely to be searched for (or found) easily.

This is a major cause of duplicates of existing tropes being proposed in the Trope Workshop.

So if a rename isn't called for, creating a redirect is the next best thing. This is popularly abbreviated by saying "redirects are free" -- but it should be noted that the ability to create redirects is not a valid argument for or against renaming.

For instructions (and general guidelines) on exactly how to create a redirect, see Help:Redirects.

When To Create a Redirect

 * If a creator is equally known by both a nickname and his real name, one should redirect to the other (e.g.,  to J. Michael Straczynski). However, this is for creators who are known by their nicknames - see "Abbreviations" under When Not To Create a Redirect, below, for other similar cases.
 * If a page has accented characters in its name, create a redirect with the closest unaccented characters to make it easier to type into the search box (e.g.,  to Pokémon).
 * If a work has a Market-Based Title, it should be a redirect to the work (e.g.,  to Spooks).
 * Similarly, Syndication Titles should redirect to the work (e.g.,  to Ironside).
 * If a work has had multiple titles over its lifespan, the work page should be created either under its original name or the name by which it is best known (if they are not the same), and all the other names it has had should be made redirects (e.g.,,  , and   all redirect to The Hogan Family).
 * If a trope has different names depending on where you are, pick one of the names for the trope name and redirect the other regional names to whichever one you chose (e.g.,  (UK) to Hot Mom (US); or   (film school) to Conspicuously Light Patch (All The Tropes)).
 * Similarly, if a work has different names depending on where you are, pick one of the names - preferably an English-language name on the English-language version of All The Tropes - for the work name and redirect the other regional names to whichever one you chose (e.g., both  and   (Japanese) to A Certain Magical Index (English).
 * If the trope has a real-world name used by specialists that we aren't already using as the trope name, redirect that name to the existing trope (e.g.,  to Source Music).

When Not To Create a Redirect
Do not create redirects for the following:
 * Misspellings (e.g.,  to Magical Girl).
 * Abbreviations (e.g.,  to any one of Wall of Text, The War on Terror, World of Tanks or The Wheel of Time). At least one admin goes out of his way to turn "abbreviation" redirects into on-topic disambiguation pages, since it's very rare for an abbreviation to mean only one thing.
 * Variations in capitalization (e.g.,   to On the Beach).  Especially if the variant capitalization runs counter to our style guidelines.
 * Shortened versions of a work name (e.g.,  to The First Men in the Moon).
 * Outright wrong versions of work titles (e.g.,  to Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea).
 * Specific examples (e.g.,  to Humongous Mecha).
 * Plurals: Regular plurals can be linked just by appending an "s" or "es" to the normal markup. For example,   becomes Game Breakers.  Handle irregular plurals with Potholes.
 * Definite articles that aren't part of the page name (e.g.,  to Tsundere).
 * Character names that aren't used as official titles (e.g.,  to Die Hard).
 * Memes to works that inspired them (e.g.  to Bleach).
 * A creator's name or nickname to one of their works (e.g.,  to Something Awful).  A creator is not synonymous with a work, even if it's the only thing they ever produced, and especially if they are only one of a set of contributors, collaborators or co-writers.  If you think a creator's name is important enough that they need a page here, make it a proper creator page.

Existing redirects that violate these guidelines are not justifications for you to do the same. In fact, for years now the mods have been slowly finding and fixing all the endless variations on proper trope and work names created by the ignorant and the lazy back on TVT. Don't make their work harder by adding to the pool.

What Not To Do When Creating a Redirect

 * Don't create a redirect to a redirect. This is called a Double Redirect and it is an unnecessary complication to the wiki structure.  If you're going to create a redirect, point directly to a page.
 * Do not put categories on a redirect.

Compare Creating Disambiguation Pages, Needs a Better Title, Needs a Better Description, and Pages Needing Images.