Redirects come in a variety of types, but one that's a little problematic are what might be called "bad redirects." These are things like misspellings (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Redirects_from_misspellings), including incorrect use of punctuation marks. Maybe a wiki strongly prefers a technical term over a non-technical term that's otherwise common, but also wrong (a misnomer). A wiki doesn't want editors linking to these, but these redirects can, nevertheless, be useful. For example, if someone types the term into the search box, or there are links into it from the outside world; see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_delete_redirects for an essay on this.

Now, by adding a magic word, for example, {{#badredirect}} or {{#badredir}} to these pages, we could wrap them in a specific CSS marker which could then be recognised by gadgets, userscripts, etc. This would allow editors to link to the desired page instead. A special page at Special:BadRedirects would provide a maintenance report that listed any internal links to these pages.

Note how this functionality is nearly identical to what Extension:Disambiguator does. Extension:Disambiguator can be used to mark pages as disambiguation pages with a magic word __DISAMBIG__. This is a 👍 great extension for any wikis that use disambiguation pages. 🙏 Thanks to Ryan @kaldari for writing this.

Because of the inherent similarity, most of the code for this already exists. It probably needs to be a separate extension, though, since it's conceivable that a wiki lacks disambiguation pages but still has these bad redirects. Or maybe it should go into core.

It's also nearly identical to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SoftRedirector -- just the magic word is different, I think.

Thanks for reading.