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Make links to section redirects that point back to the same page easily distinguishable
Open, LowPublicFeature

Description

Sometimes there are situations that sub-topics of a long articles are in fact redirects to the long article. In the same time, links to these sub-topics are used in the main article - which is very misleading to the readers, since it seems like there was a separate article providing more information on subtopic, but all users get is return to the top of the same article.

Hypothetical example:

The page [[Bar]] redirects to [[Foo#Bar]]. Elsewhere on page [[Foo]] there are link(s) to [[Bar]].

A real-life example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_(band)#History
click on "Rick Hunolt" in 2nd paragraph of History section. Whoops?

What I suggest is using another colour (not red and not blue) for such self-redirects - or perhaps treating these as self-links and making them black and not clickable.

See also https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16561


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz16562

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 10:29 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz16562.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

I'm afraid that the same code complexity applies as in bug 16561. :-/

Given example does not work anymore as article has been created in the meantime, but pretty sure this can still be seen.

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:01 AM

I think there's an issue here with terminology.

This is not a "self-redirect." Self-redirects occur when article Foo is a redirect to article Foo.

Attempting to create a self-redirect throws an error, which can be overriddden, but (1) no sane competent well-meaning user would want to (I know assuming that editors are both competent and well-meaning is risky) and (2) if they are created, a bot fixes them pretty quickly.

What you're talking about here is a redirect to a section of an article that is linked from that article.

I think the best thing here is to suggest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_requests that changes such links, such that if from Article Foo links to [[Bar]], which redirects to [[Foo#Bar]], then the link should be changed from [[Bar]] to [[#Bar]]. And if article Foo links to [[Bar]] which links to [[Foo]], then it should be removed.

Bugreporter2 renamed this task from Make links to self-redirects being easy distinguishable to Make links to section redirects that point back to the same page easily distinguishable.Feb 6 2025, 4:03 AM