Hi,
TL;DR: How can a red link be annotated in a semantic way with a foreign article title or a Wikidata Q item number?
Imagine: I'm writing a Wikipedia article in Russian. There's a red link in it. I don't have time to write the target article for that link now, but I'm sure that it should exist. In fact, that article does exist in the English Wikipedia.
I want the link to be red (fr the usual wiki reasons), but until the Russian article is written, I want to give the software a hint about which topic it is supposed to be about. Telling it the English article name would be one way to do it. Giving it the Wikidata Q item number would be an even better way to do it.
Unfortunately, MediaWiki does not currently have true syntax to do either. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
Some Wikipedias may have templates that do something like this (e.g. Russian: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:En ). But there's nothing that is uniform to all projects.
*Why* is it useful to give the software this hint in the first place? Most simplistically, it's useful to the reader - in case that reader knows English, she can at least read something.
But there's something bigger. When the ContentTranslation extension translates links, it automatically adapts links that can be found. What to do about those that can't be auto-adapted? It frequently happens when Wikipedians translate articles that many links in the created articles turn out to be red. We'd love to get ContentTranslation to help the translators make those articles by writing relevant articles with as few clicks as possible, and that is only possible by annotating the red links with the topics to which they belong.
So, any ideas? What do other Wikipedias for such annotation? Is it imaginable to add wiki syntax for such a thing? Can anybody think of a hack that reuses the current [[link]] syntax to add such annotation?
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore