Valfarly chanced upon wikipedia and thought "that'll never work"... but after using it a few times, he eventually got sufficently annoyed by a typo to do something about it and on 15th March 2004 hit edit. From there it was a slippery slope to writing articles for things he found no-one else had written about and adding tidbits, factoids and other nuggets of information to previously covered topics. Finds himself correcting spelling and grammar far too often!
A redirect is a page that has the sole purpose to automatically redirect readers to a differently named page; to take the reader where they really wanted to go. Redirects allow a topic to have more than one title. Redirects are used for synonyms, abbreviations (initialisms), acronyms, accented terms (diacritics), misspellings, typos, nicknames (pseudonyms), scientific names, etc.
To create a redirect for the term "Oof":
Type Oof in the search box, press ↵ Enter
Click on the redlink for Oof that it presents
In the edit window that appears, type #REDIRECT [[Foo]] on the first line to make it lead to the article Foo
Redirects should be organized in to categories too. Each redirect can have up to seven redirect categories. Categories go on the third line of the redirect. (Note: Plant has a subcategory within the category of scientific name; enter plant after a pipe).
Here are two examples of a redirect category using a category template:
{{R from birth name}}
{{R from scientific name|plant}}
Preview your new redirect before saving it. Make sure:
There is a big right-facing arrow to the left of the bolded name of your target page name.
That your target page is bolded in blue (if it is red, go back and double check your target name in the edit window).
That your redirect category has rendered properly and that the boilerplate it presents makes sense.
The sword-billed hummingbird (Ensifera ensifera) is a neotropical species of hummingbird from the Andean regions of South America. Among the largest species of hummingbird, it is characterized by its unusually long beak, being the only bird to have a beak longer than the rest of its body, excluding the tail. It uses this to drink nectar from flowers with long corollas and has coevolved with the plant Passiflora mixta. While most hummingbirds preen using their beaks, the sword-billed hummingbird uses its feet to scratch and preen due to its beak being so long.Photograph credit: Andy Morffew