When I said that a redlink indicates that an article does not exist, I meant that from the reader's perspective. There is no article on Bob, and the redirect doesn't point to some useful alternate article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js can add the class "self-redirect" to such links (which can then be styled with CSS), though I agree this would be nice to have in core.

With Page Previews on mouse-hover (introduced 2017-ish) this issue is semi-mitigated but continues to be an issue. It can still take many seconds to understand that the preview shown is for the very page you're reading. And if anything, the preview demonstrates that Wikipedia knows the link redirects back to this page, but is not smart enough to do anything about it.

Another issue not mentioned here is when pages redirect to subsections - ideally such cases could show the user which section they'd end up in if they clicked (in the target URL shown in the status bar of most browsers) and save an unnecessary reload of the article as an added bonus.

An example page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(Unicode)#Overview (permalink) which transcludes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Planes_(Unicode) (permalink)

The table row for plane names (starting "Basic Multilingual Plane") has links directly to other sections of Plane (Unicode), except for "Supplement­ary Special-purpose Plane" which links to its own page - which then redirects back to a section of Plane (Unicode). Because it goes through a redirect, I can't tell which section is being linked unless I click through, whereas I can with the other links in the same row.

This is a fairly benign example, but there are certainly more confusing cases out there.

P.S. I realize that this is the worst possible time to resurface issues like this, with Vector 2022 going public just yesterday and the influx of activity centered around that. Hope this doesn't get buried due to that, but if so, so be it!

For convenience, the discussion from 2015-2016 mentioned in the original description can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_142#Cyclic_redirects:_Avoid_misleading_the_reader

Somehow in my searching I didn't come across this request, and created T400734. Thank you Pppery for helping me get here. =)

I do think this would be very useful in so far as article maintenance goes for editors and readers for multiple reasons:

1. On en.WP we currently have MOS:BOLDREDIRECT which basically mimics the bolded self-ref behavior that literally linking to a page from itself already does (this is done to make it easier for a reader to find the redirect topic without scanning paragraphs of text); presumably this ticket would reproduce that self-ref behavior and make the manual bolding unnecessary
2. By using [[link]] text, if the redirect should one day be made into an actual article, the articles linking would simply work automatically
3. It would be less confusing for our readers

The solution provided by @Alsee above suggests a link with a different color. I propose simply treating it as a link to itself would be treated (that is, not generating a link and bolding the link/piped text as appropriate). Perhaps a Preference to generate a link for logged-in users, but readers are usually not going to be interested in clicking links that take them in circles. For the logged-in link, orange or dark yellow would work.

T402483: Special page at Special:RedirectsBacktoPages to identify redirects back to pages would create a special page that identified these, which would not solve the issue, but make it easier to identify when it occurs.

How does MediaWiki-extensions-Disambiguator identify disambiguation pages @kaldari ? I presume it makes a list (in Special:DisambiguationPages) and then on page rendering checks any links against the list -- is that right?

If that is the case, it makes a model that this can follow, if T402483: Special page at Special:RedirectsBacktoPages to identify redirects back to pages can generate the a of back redirects, then on page rendering a quick check can be run to see if any the page being edited is on the list (note it might appear more than once, with different links), and then identify exactly which links on the page are problematic, and throw a CSS class around them.

If it is obvious which code repository must be updated, could someone please direct me to it so that I may take a look?

In T122292#12188879, @TPI81AF wrote:

If it is obvious which code repository must be updated, could someone please direct me to it so that I may take a look?

Hi @TPI81AF

The Gerrit site is the main code repository and is at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/

You should also take a look at the guide at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Developers

Note this task might be a little tricky if you don't have programming experience. You might want to start with something in good first task instead.