No subject

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.

> > 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.

> > 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.
 
> > 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.