Editing Encyclopedia:Redirect (section)

== Technical notes ==
A Wikipedia redirect is not the same as an [[HTTP redirect]]—it does not generate an [[HTTP 302]] (or other 30{{var|x}}) response. Instead, a page with almost the same content as the target of the redirect is generated by the MediaWiki software, differing in that a small-text note appears below the title of the page, identifying the name of the redirect used to get there (and linking to it in such a way that it can be accessed without the redirect, e.g. so it can be changed). When a user clicks on a redirect such as [[housecat]], the page URL initially will be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housecat, but the URL shown by the browser will change to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat after the page loads.

On one hand, this allows links like [[housecat#Anatomy]] to work as expected, but it also requires redirects to anchors to be implemented as a piece of JavaScript that jumps to an appropriate section after the page has loaded. For example, [[second-stage boot loader]], which is rendered as the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-stage_boot_loader, is a page defined as a #REDIRECT to [[Booting#SECOND-STAGE]]. "SECOND-STAGE", in this case, is a manually defined anchor (using the markup "<syntaxhighlight lang="wikitext" inline>=== Second-stage boot loader === {{anchor|SECOND-STAGE}}</syntaxhighlight>") that will persist even if the section is renamed. However, whether a redirect points to a manually defined anchor, or an anchor defined implicitly via a section name, the behavior will be the same: the page will automatically be scrolled down to the pointed-to anchor only after the page finishes loading (at which point the URL bar will also change to reflect the redirected-to URL, including "#{{var|anchor}}" portion, rather than the redirected-from URL).
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