Coming at the problems described in bug 9040 and bug 24289 with an easy to implement fix that hopefully resolves the underlying use-cases...
Users often put language codes into URLs to switch between languages. This always works _from_ English Wikipedia, as it uses canonical names in the URL.
If there are non-canonical names in the URL, converting them from the host wiki's language into canonical names *before* being redirected to a different wiki will allow the interwiki-target-wiki to understand the URL irrespective of its language.
i.e. currently:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist redirects to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spezial:Beobachtungsliste
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/de:Special:Watchlist redirects to
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spezial:Beobachtungsliste
\o/
However,
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Spezial:Beobachtungsliste redirects to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spezial:Beobachtungsliste
which is not helpful.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Spezial:Beobachtungsliste should redirect to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/fr:Spezial:Beobachtungsliste should (on the host wiki) be converted to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/fr:Special:Watchlist which would then redirect to
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist which the fr.wp wiki would then redirect me to
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spécial:Liste_de_suivi
In addition to special pages, it would be very helpful if the same can be done for the page name messages mainpage, but a few others may also be worth doing at the same time (e.g. helppage, randompage-url)
There is a regular flow of users hitting this problem, and creating soft redirects to fix the problem. Please see these discussions
Version: 1.22.0
Severity: enhancement
See Also:
T11040: Option for circumventing automatic localized special-namespace as well as names for special pages
T26289: Search page should have interwiki links that preserve the query