Feature summary (what you would like to be able to do and where):

Media on commons are meant to be used by external websites and other publications and are heavily used by external sites. Attribution of the media is compulsory and there are two ways to link to commons.wikimedia: by filename and by curid.

Linking by filename is bad, as any file can be renamed anytime making links break ( A) direct links to a file at upload.wikimedia.../.jpg will stop to work, with no way for external reusers to find the media at commons. B) links to the description page will stop to work, if the no-redirect option was used)

Linking by curid is bad, as the curid disappears if a file is deleted and there is no way to ever find out, if the curid ever existed and what it linked to. Linking by curid is used as a standard for attribution by wordpress and curids are used by MW for "permanent" (archival) links. This means that a wordpress user, who used media from commons will not be able to find out, if the content them reused was deleted for COPYVIO or for for example being OUTOFSCOPE at commons. Doing it this way is a very big dis-service to all reusers of commons-content.

Solution

Make the curids permanent. If the ressource identified by a curid is deleted or moved without redirect, make the curid pointing to something useful. At least display info like the reason for deletion (COPYVIO or other), the message digest (to verify if a media used at wordpress originated from the MW curid, that is displayed in the wordpress site), the license that was used at commons and maybe a redirect if applicable.

Make ist possible to use curids useable for file-access (upload.commons..) to avoid dead links because of filerenaming.