Quora has a lovely feature in its visual editor: paste a URL and it's immediately and automatically converted in a smart way.
- If it's a link to another answer on Quora, it is given an appropriate title.
- If it's a link to YouTube, the video is embedded.
- If it's a link to some other website, the page's HTML <title> is inserted and automatically linked. (There may be other special cases, but you get the idea.)
After the link is thus inserted, the user can edit the text or click another button to make the actual URL appear or to make the URL just plain text.
I'd love such a feature in VE. It's especially relevant for newbies who link to other Wikipedia articles with full http links as if they were external. For external links, getting the title automatically is usually better than having a plain URL (in fact, there are some bots that automatically insert such titles). And pasting a Commons URL can embed the media as such.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement