A term I'll often use when discussing a redirect is "history dive"-- i.e. History dive indicates that blahblahblah happened in Monthcember 20XX before...
How a history dive is performed:
1. Check the history of the redirect being discussed. If it's a BLAR victim, look into the article it used to be. Otherwise, check which articles it used to be targeted to-- and if it was refined at any point.
2. Check the articles that the redirect target(ed), specifically going into THEIR history. You're specifically looking for the date the redirect was created, or if there's no entry at that date, the edit immediately prior (i.e. maybe a redirect was created December 21st, 2012, but there's no edit then; instead there's an edit December 12, 2012 and an edit on January 12, 2013. Open up the December 12 edit.) Check to see if THAT edit had a mention. Barring that, double-check to see if the edit immediately *afterward* had a mention...
3a. If there's no mention at all, go ahead and report that the redirect's never had a mention.
3b. If there's been a mention, report that, along with when the mention existed. Maybe do a further check to see when the mention was removed and why-- it could be a sign that the redirect should be retargeted to where the info was moved, or deleted outright to match an undue reference, or perhaps the mention should be readded (i.e. arctophile's reference being removed due to vandalism).
Other essays I'll often cite:
WP:RLANG - My mind processes this as "Redirect - Language" even though the actual title is "Redirects in languages other than English". Anyways, cite this when a redirect in a foreign language has no business being in that foreign language
WP:RTYPO - A section of WP:RFDO; cite this and its implied test when a given redirect is a typo.
WP:XY - WP:RFDO again; Cite here for either/or issues
WP:SNOW - "Yeah, the outcome of this RfD is pretty much already decided at this point, and nobody's expected to come out of the woodwork with an alternate viewpoint. Go ahead and close."
WP:BARTENDER - "Okay so the only thing we can decide on is that we can't keep. Closer gets to get the final say here."
May expand this section later; this is admittedly mostly to push my userboxes down in order to make them less screwy on smaller screens x3
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