Wookieepedia:Soft redirect

A soft redirect is a very short page that essentially tells the user to look at another site to obtain the information they were seeking. The technique is particularly likely to be used when redirecting users across wikis - thus (at the time of writing) Gallery of TV Guide covers is a soft redirect to w:c:swmerchandise:TV Guide.

Normal or "hard" redirects would be undesirable in these circumstances because they could not be undone without hand-crafting the correct URL (because there would be no "Redirected from [foo]" message on the page when you get to the destination, so there would be nothing to click on to take you back to the redirect page, and clicking on a link to the redirect page would take you straight to the redirect's target). 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 like a red link looks different from an ordinary link, a link to a soft redirect can look different using the stub feature. See also Redirect and/or link to non-existing page.