A soft redirect is a very short page that essentially tells users to look at another site to obtain the information they were seeking.

The technique is particularly likely to be used when redirecting users across Wikimedia sister projects—for example Wikipedia:Milestones is a soft redirect to meta:Milestones. Normal or "hard" redirects would be undesirable in these circumstances because they could not be easily edited without hand-crafting the correct URL: clicking on a link to the redirect page would take you straight to the redirect's target and there would be no "Redirected from [foo]" message to click, so it would be impossible to return to the redirect page itself. There would also be infinite loop security considerations. Therefore hard interwiki redirects have been disabled and soft redirects are often used.

A soft redirect can also be useful if one wants to link to it from its target, as an invitation to create an article, like a red link. Just as a red link looks different from an ordinary link, a link to a soft redirect can look different using the stub link feature. See also Redirect and/or link to non-existing page.

Soft redirects to foreign language editions of Wikipedia should be avoided because they will generally be unhelpful to English-language readers.

For purposes of administration, particularly deletion, soft redirects are subject to the same administration processes as regular redirects, and should not be handled by processes that are intended for articles. For Deletion this means that soft redirects are subject to R1 - R3 speedy deletion criteria, and are not subject to A1 - A8 speedy deletion criteria. For more deliberative deletion, soft redirects should be handled through Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion, and are not subject to either Wikipedia:Proposed deletion or Wikipedia:Articles for deletion.

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