jeluf wrote:

I remember a time where the search box's (Go) button directly took you to the
edit page of the non existing page. This seems no longer to be the case. This
would reduce the effort to

1. Type asdfasdf into search box and click go.
2. Type #REDIRECT [[Correct name]]
3. save.

That would make searching really, really hard since non-exact title matches would go to an edit page instead
of returning search results. Doesn't sound like a good idea.

wikimedia-bugzilla wrote:

Definately the second comment is a bad idea, but the first could be okay, with
some note for beginners (maybe best to limit it to logged-in users too).

trevj wrote:

Would also be helpful if a drop-down menu of {{R from}} templates were available.

Nice idea, Can be implemented quite easily with js.

Currently in VisualEditor:

"You can make a page a redirect to another page by checking the "Redirect this page to" checkbox, and then selecting in the box below the page to which you want this page to point.
At the bottom is the option to prevent page renames updating this redirect, which is very rarely used."

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:VisualEditor/User_guide#Editing_page_settings

As matanya says, a gadget could also do this work.

As a feature request for MediaWiki Core, this looks like a WONTFIX.