Last modified: 2011-07-15 04:28:36 UTC
I've been advised to bring up the following proposal, which takes the needs of smaller wikis into consideration, here (actual discussion has taken place at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Highlighting_possible_internal_links_in_the_editor): This proposal refers to internal links to already created pages. Entering text into an editor, we can create an internal link by adding double square brackets around a phrase which agrees with the title of a wiki page. Couldn't such agreements be pointed out to us automatically? A background color, for instance, could highlight phrases like "internal links" after having typed them into the editor with the double square brackets being set when double-clicking on the highlighted phrase. Every possible internal link could be represented that way and we would just have to double-click those which we want on the page. Another background color could be used for possible links to disambiguation pages, which would give us the opportunity to adjust the possible links so that they would link to specific pages rather than disambiguation pages. Of course, internal links would still have to be created the old way if we wanted phrases to link to pages with which they do not agree, i.e. if piped links are required.
Greetings, This is not likely to be implemented in the wiki software itself. This is because in order to do this, we would need to perform a query against the entire page table every time a user attempted to edit a page, which would carry extreme performance problems. For very small wikis, this is feasible, however would probably have to be implemented on the client side (as JavaScript working with the API). A few more things to consider: Some articles have titles more than one word long, and so there could be ambiguities in what was to be highlighted. On wiktionaries, this would result in every incidence of 'a', 'the', and so on being highlighted. In fact, most wikipedias have an article for every letter, common numbers, and so on. There are actually a few alternative wiki page editing tools - that do things like WYSIWYG, for example - that might already do something like this, and that are probably better suited for doing it that our default editor, which has always been a simple textarea. Closing wontfix.
