Improve handling of wiki links to non-existing pages

[danielquinlan]

Could the bot be modified to not respond to wiki links that don't point at a real page?

Could the bot be modified to handle links to missing pages differently than links that exist?

This generally happens due to people making jokes in chat. Perhaps the bot could react with a "404" emoji until and unless the wiki link is fixed to point at something (at which point it could post the link(s) update its response and remove the reaction). If there are multiple links and some work, it could respond with the ones that did work and note that some did not put links that don't resolve into a different section of the same response.

Thanks for this bot!

[AntiCompositeNumber]

Links to redlinks are valuable. I routinely screw up the shortcuts to pages, use the redlink search link to find the correct page, and then update the link. Having to do this manually, especially on mobile, would be quite annoying.
If people are making long joke links they should be \-ing out the brackets.

[danielquinlan]

If people are making long joke links they should be \-ing out the brackets.

Very few people actually do that.

Perhaps the solution needs to be more interactive (between the bot and the user). I don't want to be prescriptive about the solution, but the bot would ideally handle red links better than it does right now.

• It currently gives zero indication of whether a link resolves or not, and it could do that. For example, it could preface red links in a latter section starting with "Red link" or a red icon.
• No emoji reaction is given to users posting red links, perhaps inadvertently, to let them know they so they are informed in case they want to fix them. It should do that.

[stjohann]

I think regulating any jokey responses is a responsibility of server moderators and not the bot. There are many ways to make it so the bot doesn't respond to a link and users can be reminded of that (<nowiki>, code syntax, backslash, quote syntax). So if this issue was only about the first part of the proposal, it would've been closed. There are legitimate cases for red links and disabling them entirely is a non-starter.

As for the part of distinguishing existing links vs non-existing, that would be pretty helpful, although probably the hint should not in a way you're suggesting. The answer to why it hasn't been done at the moment is pretty simple, though: the bot makes minimal API requests to any wiki server during the response and this would introduce additional API waiting time (though not significant for Wikimedia projects) to all responses. Although since some types of responses already end up requiring API requests (user page links in languages with gendered names), it might be worthwhile to universalise that. Can't promise anything though since that would be a significant rewrite.