Help:Fixing bad redirects

What is a redirect?

If you put this line on a page, the page will redirect the reader's browser to the destination page:

#REDIRECT [[destination page]]

Examples of redirecting pages

• "Niku" redirects to "Nikumaroro"

Niku

• "Gardner Island" redirects to "Nikumaroro"

Gardner Island

When redirects go wrong ...

• I messed up the list of Niku expeditions in the beginning of the Niku IIIIP (1999) history. If you go to that page, you can see the beginning of the accident chain.

Niku IIIIP got redirected to Niku IIII (1999) when I realized my mistake.

Niku IIIIP ==> Niku IIII (1999)

• But I got the year wrong for Niku IIII. It's supposed to be Niku IIII (2001. So we fixed that by moving Niku IIII (1999) to Niku IIII (2001). It felt good! But that left this chain of redirects in the system:

Niku IIIIP ==> Niku IIII (1999) ==> Niku IIII (2001)

• The system does not like double redirects, so some part of it (the "Redirect fixer"--who knew?) looked at a redirect point to a redirect pointing to a real page. It dropped out the middle man for us. Nice move, Redirect fixer!

Niku IIIIP ==> Niku IIII (2001)

• But there is supposed to be an independent page for Niku IIIIP. Now we had a bad redirect.

Fixing that bad boy for good

1. Look at the top of the page at which you have unexpectedly arrived.
2. If it says "redirected from"--and if that is an invalid redirection--then click on the blue link for the page that did the redirection.
3. Edit the page that you come to.
4. Remove this content:#REDIRECT [[wrong destination page]]
5. Save the page.

It will no longer take you to the wrong page.

You can also look at the history for the page and see whether there was every any VALID content on it. If there is, you could copy the good content from the page to the recently saved empty page (this is better than using undo in this case, I think).