links like [[Winter Olympic Games|Winter Olympics]], since the redirects are "invisible", while the pipe-linking is an ugliness on the edit side (especially when they accumulate).

Another reason that redirecting is better is because it reduces duplication of work--instead of everyone having to write [[democracy|democratic]] every time they want to link "democratic", a single redirect allows everyone to just write [[democratic]].

But I'd also like the REDIRECT functionality improved.

I'd argue for the compromise of letting users decide case-by-case instead of have a rigid uncompromising technological solution, since there are times where the piping is better, at least in the current scheme.

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3. Marking [broken links]] and [[more broken links]
4. Optimizing external links with too many [] (like

[[http://www.google.com]])

Both of those things are nice.

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5. Optimizing [[link|links]] to [[link]]s

Please don't! Not only is the result very ugly, but it would lead to inconsistent link appearance for irregular and regular plurals ([[foot|feet]] vs [[hand]]s), never mind the issue of other languages.

The new software renders [[hand|hands]] and [[hand]]s the same as a single link (try it!), so it would be a nice optimization on the edit side to use the latter. Again, I like the reduction of pipes as much as possible.

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I am sure you can think of some more details that have always bugged you, but that were (be themselves) not important enough to call for a function;)

We could use this for rather fancy things as well:

7. In the preview, mark words (or word combinations) that are currently

plain text, but that do exist as a topic in the database (to find pages one could link to). 8. In the preview, mark all numbers that could be dates (more link candidates). 9. Automatically put the title phrase in bold if it appears in the first paragraph.

I'd say instead of this being in the preview, it should be a separate command of AutoText.