For what it’s worth, I don’t see any particular explanation in T87114 or the attached Gerrit change why Special:RedirectEntity shows a success message rather than redirecting to the result. (I’m assuming Special:MergeItems and Special:MergeLexemes took the behavior from Special:RedirectEntity.) From what I can tell, it could have been an arbitrary choice that we should feel free to change now. (But I might be wrong ^^)

Do I understand the options correctly?

Option 1:

1. I go to Special:RedirectEntity while not logged in
2. I enter the IDs to redirect from/to
3. I click "Redirect"
4. I get redirected to central log-in wiki
5. I get send back to Special:RedirectEntity with some special parameters
6. The edit is made for me under the temp user name

and then? 🤔

Option 2:
Same as above and then

7. I get redirected to the redirect target entity

Not quite. These steps are the same in both options:

1. Go to Special:RedirectEntity while not logged in
2. enter the IDs to redirect from/to
3. click "Redirect"
4. edit is made under the temp user name
5. get redirected to central log-in wiki
6. temp user name is ✨made more persistent✨ in CentralAuth (I don’t really understand the details tbh ^^)

And then option 1 is:

7. get sent to Special:RedirectEntity with some special parameters, to show “X was redirected to Y”
8. if you want, you can now go to the items that were recreated (though in Special:RedirectEntity the message doesn’t actually link to the items ^^ in Special:MergeItems it does), or redirect another pair of entities (go back to step 1)

and option 2 is:

7. get sent to the Y item, or a diff view, or something else
8. if you want to do another pair of redirects, you have to go back to Special:RedirectEntity

Gotcha! Thanks.
Ok right now Special:Merge does the redirect edits and then shows you the following:

I think we don't want to have different behaviour in this between temporary accounts and proper accounts. So I'd say we either do send them back to Special:Merge and show the message or we change it for everyone to redirect to the merge target. The message seems a bit more useful to me to make it clear that the merge has actually succeeded.

I think we don't want to have different behaviour in this between temporary accounts and proper accounts. So I'd say we either do send them back to Special:Merge and show the message or we change it for everyone to redirect to the merge target.

Yeah, what I had in mind was changing it for everyone, not just temporary accounts.

The message seems a bit more useful to me to make it clear that the merge has actually succeeded.

Alright, then we can add a success state to the special page.