On 1/22/07, Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com wrote:
It's the very first comment, by the person who WONTFIXed it (i.e., Brion, who as you may recall is the lead developer): "Redirects are meant to be a transparent part of the user interface. Behaving just like other links is desired behavior, not a bug."
"Transparent" is ambiguous here. Normally in these contexts, transparent means "the user can see exactly what is going on". Whereas Brion apparently meant "invisible", in the sense that "transparent" glass is kind of "invisible".
Semantics aside, being able to distinguish redirects from links to real articles strikes me as useful, and not "undesirable" at all. Example: I have a page in my user space that links to all the stubs I've started. Clicking "related changes" shows any changes to any page I started - useful for me. If anyone renames any of those stubs, it becomes a redirect. "Related changes" then quietly[1] breaks, because future changes to the stub no longer show up. It would be very handy for me to see which of my links are actually pointing to redirects.
Remember we're still talking about "maintenance mode" here - you wouldn't want redirects to show up specially for users in normal mode (especially non-logged-in users).
Steve [1] The actual change to a redirect will show up, once.