Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-10473115-20160318003136/@comment-10473115-20160318222801

I'm sure that you check links, although it was indeed a broken link from the file move which prompted me to this thread. I don't want to get argumentative about this because it's really a quite minor thing but I can't see a logic for deleting redirects to ensure no links are broken. Isn't it even more ensuring to fix incoming links and still leave a redirect? Some might even come from outside of our wiki or from search engine and we can't never be sure if the redirect is really unused. MediaWiki and Wikia in its version of it have made it default to move pages with leaving the redirect and suppressredirect -right is available only to admins (because there's also redirects which should be deleted), so the question should be, could they be helpful or harmful. I quote MediaWiki's help page: "There's generally no need to delete redirects. They do not occupy a significant amount of database space. If a page name is vaguely meaningful, there's no harm, and some benefit, in having it as a redirect to the more relevant or current page."

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirect#Suppressing_redirects and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirect#When_should_we_delete_a_redirect.3F