Minh Nguyen wrote:
Jan Vanoverpelt wrote:
I think this problem is due to the fact that i have created some kind of "hard link" behind the image, so that the user is always forced to go directly to the edit-box with the preloaded text in it. Is there a way to fix this, so that the user (after he/she visited the non-existing page for the first time, added something and saved it) is directly taken to the actual page the second time (like is done in case of "normal" links) ??
Yes, I think there is: the English Wikipedia has an "exists" template http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Exists to check if a particular page has been created yet.
Eww! That's clever, but also incredibly ugly. I can see why a template (or a parser function) for this might be useful, but Jan's problem would be much cleanly solved by a small patch to MediaWiki.
A minimal patch would be to add a new action ("action=editnew"?) that would act like "action=edit", but only if the page does not already exist.
A slightly more invasive solution would be to show the edit box even in the absence of "action=edit" if the page does not exist and the preload parameter has been given. This would avoid the need for a new action, and the presence of the preload parameter seems a fairly good indication that page creation is desired.
A radical, but simple, solution would be to show the edit box for _all_ nonexistent pages, with or without "action=edit". After all, all MediaWiki-generated links to nonexistent pages already do have "action=edit" included.
The last suggestion would probably require some special handling for blocked users, since we don't really want to trigger an autoblock just because a blocked user clicked what he thought was a bluelink. This is related to Bug 4990, which apparently has been marked WONTFIX "for caching reasons". I realize this is going off on a tangent, but could someone who understands that comment (Brion? Rob?) explain it to me?