It would be really nice if redirects were replaced by a system of aliases, which were part of the metadata to the article.
In particular, if you could do regular expressions, like:
Fr[ée]deri(que|c) (Fran[çc]ois)? (Leblanc|Gonzale[zs]) (Jr(.)?)?
Obviously you'd want to place restrictions to cut down the number of matches, but this would save a lot of tedious redirect creating.
In fact the expression language would only need one feature: multiple options for parts of a word, preferably nested. So the above example could actually be expressed:
Fr[é|e]deri[que|c] [Fran[ç|c]ois|] [Leblanc|Gonzale[z|s]] [Jr[.|]]
Not so abusable. Very useful. Any takers to implement it? :)
Shouldn't be too hard to implement as long as you don't mind it taking half an hour to load each page as the code has to check every article in the database to see which have an alias which matches whatever you typed in/clicked on. (And that's without addressing the issue of duplicates. A redirect can only point to one article, a given string can match the regexps in many articles. Automated disambig pages, perhaps?)
Nice idea, though.