Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Orphanage/Articles orphaned without redirects

Consider the situation where A is a redirect page to B, both in the article namespace. Say that A has no page in the article namespace linking to it. Well, it fully acceptable for a redirect page to have no articles linking to it. Therefore, we exclude such "orphaned" redirects fromWikipedia:Orphaned Articles.

Now, let's say that A is the only page in the article namespace that links to B. B is not considered to be an orphan, because another article links to it. But it is effectively an orphan. You can't get to it from any other true article.

So, one way to use this meta page is to look for effective orphans, and find them parents.

-Anthropos 16:07, 5 Jan 2004 (UTC)

There is also the possibility that there are isolated groups of articles that link to each other, but are not linked from anywhere else. These would also not show up as orphans, but would be kind of orphanish - and rather hard to detect. --snoyes 16:22, 5 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Allowing myself to dream a bit...What I'd like to see is a fuction that identifies pages that have no "backward" route to the main page. By backward, I mean through the what links here list. Or, to state it another way, a function that identifies pages that cannot be reached from the main page simply by clicking on links within articles. The resulting list would include all the current orphans, plus the type of isolated pages that you describe.

An interesting game is to go to a random page, then use the "what links here" function to find your way to the main page. It'd be interesting to know what the "longest shortest-path-to-main" is. -Anthropos 04:29, 6 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Most of the Rambot-articles with (town), (CDP), or (city) in the title are effective orphans. -- User:Docu

Bloomfield, Michigan

There are two entries on this list for Bloomfield, Michigan: Bloomfield Township (CDP), Michigan and Bloomfield Township (township), Michigan. They appear to be identical, except for a minor difference in population (anyone want to take a guess about how that happened?) Is there any objection to moving the township article to Bloomfield Township, Oakland County, Michigan? (There are three Bloomfield Townships in Michigan.) BTW, I've never moved an article before. Bkonrad 17:31, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I'm not really familiar with how a CDP is determined by the US Census Bureau, but these are technically two different "places" according to the Census which is where RamBot got the data. CDP is a Census-Designated Place. You also see several other designations that on this orphan with out redirect page such as (town), (city), (village). I've added a proposed method of taking care of these on the Wikiproject Cities talk page. - Redjar 14:57, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)