All The Tropes:Creating New Redirects

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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: [[JMS]] to J. Michael Straczynski.
  • 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: [[Pokemon]] to Pokémon.
  • If a work has a Market-Based Title, it should be a redirect to the work: [[MI-5]] to Spooks.
  • Similarly, Syndication Titles should redirect to the work: [[The Raymond Burr Show]] 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: [[Valerie]], [[Valerie's Family]], and [[The Hogans]] 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: [[Yummy Mummy]] (UK) to Hot Mom (US); or [[Fudd Flag]] (film school) to Conspicuously Light Patch (All The Tropes).

When Not To Create a Redirect

Do not create redirects for the following:

  • Misspellings: [[Magical Grrl]] to Magical Girl.
  • Abbreviations: [[WoT]] to The Wheel of Time
  • Variations in capitalization: [[On The Beach]] to On the Beach.
  • Specific examples: [[KMF]] to Humongous Mecha.
  • Plurals: Regular plurals can be linked just by appending an "s" or "es" to the normal markup. For example, [[Game Breaker]]s becomes Game Breakers. Handle irregular plurals with Potholes.
  • Definite articles that aren't part of a work title: [[The Tsundere]] to Tsundere.
  • Character names that aren't used as official titles (e.g. [[John McClane]] to Die Hard).
  • Memes to works that inspired them (e.g. [[Leekspin]] to Bleach).

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