Hi All,

You used to be able to use GET requests to preview edits to the Wikipedia.

For example, this link worked in January 2005: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=East_Balmain&wpTextbox1=%23RE...

Clicking this link used to preview adding a redirect at the "East Balmain" article, with the article text being "#REDIRECT [[Balmain East, New South Wales]]", and the edit summary being "Redirect to [[Balmain East, New South Wales]]". All the user had to do then was click "Save". It was incredibly useful, because it meant software could generate new possible articles and redirect, and then a human could yes/no veto them. It also meant that these possible items could be listed on the Wikipedia itself, because the Wikipedia allows GET arguments but not POST arguments in links - and this in turn allowed the Wikipedia to be used to extend the Wikipedia - it was, in short, extremely useful.

( Of course this functionality could be abused, in the same way that _any_ technology can be used for both positive and negative purposes. An example of project that used this in a positive way can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nickj/Redirects )

Now however it seems like these GET requests no longer work. Have I missed something obvious (i.e. it's just a dumb-user problem with the GET request) ? Or is it something to do with the Wikipedia itself (i.e. a server-side thing) ? If so, is it intentional? If it's not intentional, can we please have this functionality back? (At least for new articles: I can understand why it's a bad idea for edits to existing articles because it allows thoughtless overwriting of previous content - but this argument doesn't apply if there isn't something there already).

All the best, Nick.