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Wikipedia:Statistical redirects

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One use of redirects is for statistics on how often pages are accessed from certain links. For example, when trying to decide if the COVID-19 pandemic should stay on in the news on the main page, the articles were linked to with tracking redirects such as COVID-19 pandemic*, which would be accessed in no other way except for those links.

Format

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Tracking redirects are created as an unlikely modification of the target's title. The exact format for this is undecided.

Redirect categories

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The only redirect category templates that should be applied are {{R from statistical redirect}} and, if the redirect is in mainspace, {{R unprintworthy}}. These should be applied within the {{Redirect category shell}} to ensure protection levels are detected and categorized appropriately.

Protection

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Tracking redirects should be extended confirmed protected. There is generally no need to edit these, but full protection is usually unnecessary.

Disambiguation

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One use for statistical redirects is to record clicks from disambiguation pages to their entries. However, such use may conflict with WP:DABPIPE, either by concealing the title of a linked article with a piped link or by using a redirect in a way that would otherwise be unnecessary.

Alternatives to statistical redirects

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The Clickstream datasets list pairs of page titles between which ten or more clicks were recorded within each month, with counts. For example, they reveal how many times a reader moved from Mercury to Mercury (planet) (or lack such a record, indicating that the count is less than ten).