[[Appendix:Proto-Slavic/zǫbъ|zǫbъ]], [[Appendix:Proto-Balto-Slavic/źambas|źambas]]

Something like a redirect is OK by me, in principle. But, in Wiktionary, aren't spelling variants usually treated with a specific page that has a specific template like {{alternative spelling of}} plus a redirect to the preferred spelling?

And, even though it is true that reconstructions are more like formulas than like actual words, still they are words, which is why they are here at Wiktionary (I note formulas do not have pages here, which again is OK by me). And to say that *źombos is "the same thing" as *źambas in a way that is different from the way in which, say, plow and plough, or 𐍅𐌰𐌹𐍂 (wair) and wair, or zob and зоб, are "the same thing", is probably metaphysically correct, but in actual practice not very much. In all those cases, the reason for having both forms is that "both are used" (likewise both *źombos and *źambas are used, if I understand you correctly), and that an interested user could look for one of the forms, not knowing that the other also existed, and s/he should be able to find it (likewise for *źombos and *źambas). (Likewise, if Wiktionary listed formulas as words, it should indeed treat E = hν and E = hf as spelling variants, with independent pages, and E = ħω as something slightly different, a "rescaling" or "change of units", since it includes the 2π constant to allow the use of angular variables rather than non-angular ones, which is not the hace for hν and hf, two pure notational variants; but still with a separate page plus a link to the "default" formulation.)

I wonder if I should raise the issue somewhere else. There may be a need for more precision in the formatting of pages for reconstructed protoforms; apparently there aren't guidelines to it the way there are for normal lexical pages in various languages. --Pereru (talk) 23:00, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, both are used, and that's why the redirect can be created. "Alternative form" is ambiguous when it comes to reconstructions. In some cases, there may be two forms that can both be reconstructed and both were demonstrably used by speakers at the time; this would be an alternative form in the same sense that we use it for regular languages. But it could also just mean an alternative reconstruction from a different source, and that speakers really used one or the other but we can't tell which. That isn't really an alternative form though, more like an alternative hypothesis/reconstruction. For the entries I created, I have used "alternative form" entries only in the first sense, and created redirects for the second type. That was the common practice for Indo-European entries before I came to Wiktionary, so I adopted it as well. Several of our PIE entries list alternative reconstructions either on the headword line or in a usage note.