One use of redirects is for statistics on how often pages are accessed from certain links. For example, when trying to decide if the COVID-19 pandemic should stay on in the news on the main page, the articles were linked to with tracking redirects such as COVID-19 pandemic*, which would be accessed in no other way except for those links.

This proposal has become dormant through lack of discussion by the community. It is inactive but retained for historical interest. If you want to revive discussion on this subject, try using the talk page or start a discussion at the village pump.

This page in a nutshell: redirects can be used to collect data about which links pages are accessed from.

Tracking redirects are created as an unlikely modification of the target's title. The exact format for this is undecided.

The only redirect category templates that should be applied are {{R from statistical redirect}} and, if the redirect is in mainspace, {{R unprintworthy}}. These should be applied within the {{Redirect category shell}} to ensure protection levels are detected and categorized appropriately.

Tracking redirects should be extended confirmed protected. There is generally no need to edit these, but full protection is usually unnecessary.

One use for statistical redirects is to record clicks from disambiguation pages to their entries. However, such use may conflict with WP:DABPIPE, either by concealing the title of a linked article with a piped link or by using a redirect in a way that would otherwise be unnecessary.

The Clickstream datasets list pairs of page titles between which ten or more clicks were recorded within each month, with counts. For example, they reveal how many times a reader moved from Mercury to Mercury (planet) (or lack such a record, indicating that the count is less than ten).