Help:Introduction to navigating Wikipedia/5
Introduction
Navigating Wikipedia
Namespaces
The different types of pages
Searching pages
Tricks to find what you want
Page histories
See past revisions
Redirects and shortcuts
Redirecting traffic
Useful links
Handy pages for editors
Summary
Review of what you've learned
Redirects
Some pages on Wikipedia are redirects — they don't have any content of their own, but just send you on to another page. For example UK is a redirect to United Kingdom. So, if you type UK in the search box, it will take you directly to the article on the United Kingdom. (There will also be a note below the article title saying "Redirected from UK".)
To create a redirect to a page:
- Via wiki markup: Click the Redirect icon button and type the destination page or use the code
#REDIRECT [[Destination]]. - Via VisualEditor: Use the File:OOjs UI icon menu.svg File:MediaWiki Vector skin action arrow.svg menu and then click File:OOjs UI icon pageSettings.svg Page settings to choose a destination page.
Shortcuts
Wikipedians often refer to internal Wikipedia pages by shortcut names to make typing quicker. The Wikipedia namespace prefix can also be further abbreviated as WP:. These shortcut pages are just redirects to the target page.
For example, Wikipedia:Neutral point of view can be written as WP:NPOV to link to it, or typed into the search bar. Shortcuts to a page are usually listed in a box in the top right of that page.