I can't seem to navigate to any pages starting in "C:" on the English Wikipedia, as no matter how I try to get to them they redirect me to the main namespace page on Wikimedia Commons for everything after the ":". I seem to recall that you used to be able to use pages starting in "C:" as shortcut redirects to the Category namespace, but this doesn't seem to work anymore.
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On enwiki, c: is an interwiki linking prefix to link to Wikimedia Commons. Therefore, page titles cannot start with such a prefix at all, there are no pages on enwiki starting with “C:”. It is not (and never was) a shortcut redirect to the Category namespace. There is a convention of using CAT: as a shortcut to redirect to categories, and there are quite a lot of those.
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Ok, although I distinctly remember C:SD was at one time a redirect to Category:Candidates for Speedy Deletion. This was a while ago, however...it seems to have been the case up until 2014. See revision here.
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@Mormegil Is there any way that this functionality could be reinstated somehow while also preserving the ability to use "c:" as the interwiki linking prefix for Commons, perhaps by allowing the creation of redirects on pages starting with "C:" and having links follow the redirects if they exist and link to Commons if they don't? In the rare instance a redirect exists when a Commons page needs to be linked the Commons page can still be linked with the "commons:" prefix, so the ability to link to pages on Commons would not be lost even if "C:" category shortcuts were re-enabled. The current "CAT:" for categories is rather unwieldy and only reduces the length of a link by five letters. Even "CT:" or "CG"would be preferable in place of (or in addition to) "CAT:" if there's no way the ability to use "C:" for shortcutting to "Category:" can be restored, since they are shorter and less unweildy to type while using the left shift key. If consensus is needed to implement any of this I would be happy to start a discussion over the matter.
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Right, C: was used as a convention for hand-created redirects into the category namespace, but it never was a category namespace alias (IIANM).
I don’t think there is a possibility to “override” an interwiki prefix by a local page in the current MediaWiki version. AFAIK, page titles are parsed and processed without regard to what pages exist, so if a title looks like an interwiki link, it is an interwiki link. Cf. e.g. mw:Manual:cleanupTitles.php.
I’d expect a feature request for that would already exist somewhere, but I am unable to find it. (And, even then, I’d expect it to be declined, but that’s just IMHO.)