This is a feature request.

Wiki links to non-existent pages, best known as "red links", are A Good Thing. They encourage the creation of new pages, and they automatically spring to life on many pages when the relevant article is created.

Wikidata has many items about which there could be an article in Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, or another wiki, but which doesn't exist yet. Sometimes it exists in other languages and sometimes it doesn't exist in any language. It would be great to have a robust way to associate red links in Wikibase client wikis with items on the Wikibase repo. Such a thing has been discussed informally in meetings and mailing lists for a few years, but I'm not aware of a task that documents this wish, so I'm creating it. If there is another one, please merge it.

Currently red links just point to creating a page. This is generally useful, but associating a red link with a Wikibase item can provide several advantages:

• Disambiguation. Different people and things may have the same name. When this happens, creating an article with this name will create unwanted blue links.
• The title of the article is not necessarily known before it's created. Different editors may create different red links to what is supposed to be the same article. While it does happen that several Q items exist about the same thing, their uniqueness is usually managed better.
• The possibility of knowing that a corresponding article exists in another language. This allows several things, most notably suggesting to translate it and pre-filling its title in Content Translation.
• The possibility of showing some useful information from Wikidata property values using a tool such as ArticlePlaceholder.
• The possibility of pre-filling some information from Wikidata when creating a new article. This could be done by integrating additional tools such as Reasonator or Content Translation, but the association suggested here is a necessary step on the way to having this.

Some Wikipedias handle this using a template, for example {{Interlanguage link}} in the English Wikipedia or {{Lien Wikidata}} in French. However, because of the nature of how templates work, such a solution is not robust enough:

• This is not integrated with Wikidata at all. Wikidata doesn't know that the red link or the empty page to which it leads are associated with the Q item.
• It is not properly integrated with Visual Editor. For VE it's just a generic template like any other and not a first-class link object.
• The implementation and the parameters are different in different wikis, and the whole point of such a feature is supposed to be uniformity across wikis.

So such a feature either requires new wiki syntax (just a crazy idea: [[[Q42|Douglas Adams]]] or maybe [[item:Q42|Douglas Adams]]; but it can be anything else), a magic word, or special treatment of templates like {{Interlanguage link}} in Visual Editor.

When this is implemented, the whole nature and design of links in general and red links in particular may change, so it's a big request, but it has to start somewhere :)

I also spoke about this topic at Wikimania 2019:

https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Technology_outreach_%26_innovation/Let%27s_completely_change_how_wiki_links_work

And also at the "Between the Brackets" podcast:
https://betweenthebrackets.libsyn.com/episode-60-amir-aharoni