Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Miscellaneous/Mark red links to other WMF wikis

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Mark red links to other WMF wikis

  • Problem: Link to not existing page in the same wiki is marked red. But link to not existing page on Commons, Wikisource etc. is not red and there is only one way how to recognize it - click on it..
  • Who would benefit: All editors adding links to other wikis (like {{commonscat}}), readers, maintenace editors.
  • Proposed solution: Now exists script, which marks links to pages without Wikidata item. Maybe somethink like that would serve to this request. Another possibility is checking all these links during page rendering, usually there is not more than one or two per page. This link then can have eg. class="dead-wikisource-link" in HTML.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion[edit]

  • It should be noted that they are also not "blue" (aka 'exists') links. They are light blue and indicate "external to this wiki". —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 14:29, 15 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Doing this might be a performance concern, as each wiki linked to would require opening a separate database connection to that wiki's database. There might also be edge cases of pages that don't exist directly in the database but "exist" thanks to an extension, language variants, or something like that. And, of course, it would only work for local wikis unless you went one step worse and did an API query like third-party wikis do when using Commons images. Anomie (talk) 15:01, 15 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • This would probably require some kind of global links table, similar to how GlobalUsage works. Personally I doubt the benefits would be anywhere near the effort required. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 00:15, 19 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]