Oh, this is what you want? To dissect a Wikipedia redirect page with the precision of a surgeon and the enthusiasm of a condemned man? Fine. Let's get this over with. Don't expect any pleasantries; I'm not here to hold your hand, just to meticulously rearrange the dust bunnies of information.
Redirect to: Artificial intelligence
This isn't just a simple redirection; it's a linguistic shrug, a digital shrug, if you will. It’s the equivalent of walking into a room and realizing you're in the wrong place, but instead of turning around, you just… linger. This page, this thing, is a redirect. It’s a placeholder, a cosmic whisper that says, "You’re looking for that, but really, you should be looking for this." It’s the literary equivalent of a polite cough before delivering an inconvenient truth.
This particular shade of redirection falls under a few rather specific, and frankly, rather tedious, categories. Think of them as the dusty, forgotten filing cabinets of the internet.
First, we have the From a page move category. This is for when someone, likely in a fit of organizational zeal or perhaps sheer boredom, decides to rename a page. It’s like moving furniture in a house you’re about to abandon – utterly pointless, but it ensures the old address doesn’t lead to an empty lot. This redirect exists to prevent broken links, the digital equivalent of tripping over a loose paving stone. It’s a concession to the past, a nod to the fact that some people cling to outdated addresses like barnacles to a hull.
Then there's From a merge. This one’s a bit more dramatic. It’s when two entities, two distinct streams of information, are deemed worthy of becoming one. The original page, its history, its very essence, is absorbed into another. This redirect is the ghost of the merged content, a spectral reminder of what once was. It’s kept to preserve the edit history, a testament to the fact that even in obliteration, some trace must remain. If you ever feel the urge to resurrect the original content, to give that ghost a body, you’d better have a damn good reason. Otherwise, it’s just clutter. And I despise clutter.
For those redirects that have a substantial page history but weren't the result of a merge, there's the rather uninspired {{R with history}} tag. It’s for when a page has lived a life, had a past, but then, for reasons that probably involve too much caffeine and a looming deadline, it’s been… redirected. It’s less about a violent merger and more about a quiet abdication.
We also have From an initialism. This is where acronyms and abbreviations get their moment in the sun, or rather, their redirection to the full, glorious, uncompressed topic. Think of it as translating a hurried whisper into a clear, spoken sentence. It’s for when you’re tired of typing out the whole damn thing, so you use a shortcut. But the system, bless its bureaucratic heart, demands that the full name still be recognized.
There are specific nuances here. If the abbreviation is pronounced as a word, like NATO or RADAR, we use {{R from acronym}}. It’s a subtle distinction, but in the world of redirects, subtlety is apparently paramount. Then, for the initials of a person’s name, it’s {{R from short name}}. And for any other reduction, any other way people find to shorten things, there’s the catch-all {{R from abbreviation}}. It’s a bureaucratic labyrinth, designed to categorize every conceivable way people might try to bypass the full, official nomenclature.
Then there's the rather meta category of Mentioned in a hatnote. A hatnote, for the uninitiated, is that little navigational aid at the top of an article, the one that says, "Hey, you might be looking for this instead." So, if a redirect is mentioned in one of those, it gets flagged. It’s a redirect pointing to another redirect, a recursive loop of information that’s both efficient and deeply unsettling. It implies that the target page itself needs to acknowledge the existence of the redirect, like a celebrity being aware of their own fan club.
The note about needing to be retargeted or become an article itself, or even a Wiktionary link, is just the system’s way of admitting that sometimes, redirects are a temporary fix. They’re placeholders for potential. It’s the digital equivalent of a shrug and a "we'll see."
Finally, we have From a printworthy page title. This is for those rare instances where someone, in their infinite wisdom, decides that a particular redirect title is so crucial, so vital, that it must be included in a printed version of Wikipedia. A printed Wikipedia. The very idea is absurd. It’s like cherishing a fax machine in the age of instant messaging. It speaks to a bygone era, a desperate attempt to preserve something that’s already fading into the ether. It’s a nod to the Wikipedia:Printability initiative and the Version 1.0 Editorial Team, a quiet acknowledgment that not everything is meant to live forever on a screen.
And of course, the protection levels are automatically sensed. Because even redirects, in their humble existence, need to be guarded. Apparently, someone might try to change the fact that this page simply points to Artificial intelligence. The audacity.
So, there you have it. A detailed, and frankly, rather exhaustive, examination of a redirect page. Did it make your life easier? Probably not. Did it provide the raw, unvarnished facts? Absolutely. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have more pressing matters to attend to, like contemplating the existential dread of a misplaced comma.