Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-5175866-20140528154008/@comment-452-20140528164317

Superdadsuper wrote: Some redlinks could cause articles uneeded Redlinks to pages which should not be created should definitely be removed. I check Special:WantedPages daily for this reason.

As far as I'm concerned, a redlink is an invitation to users to create a page, so if admins allow unnecessary redlinks to remain, then they're asking for that page to be created.

Superdadsuper wrote: then having the redlinks left for readers can look bad I think it encourages people to create articles, and I encourage people to add redlinks for any valid keyword which should lead to more information. As Tupka217 said, it's better to have the links there in advance.

I've updated Mediawiki:noarticletext to check whether a page has links to it, and based on that display a notice about whether the page should or should not be created.

Superdadsuper wrote: and can hurt SEO. Is there proof of this? Surely if that were true, red links would be marked with rel="nofollow" (I checked, they aren't.)

Superdadsuper wrote: Yet if I being the main editor do not have the knowledge needed to create an article based on a redlink I often have this problem too. One solution is to create basic stub articles for all valid topics (Or just those at the top of WantedPages), you could use the normal Stub template, or you could create a new cleanup-like template to add to the top of the article explaining to readers that the article needs them to help add what they know.

My own results are inconclusive whether or not creating stub articles is better than leaving redlinks. If you have a "default page template", it's definitely better to create a stub article using it, as there's no guarantee that someone else creating the page will use it, and the second edit to most new pages ends up being me adding the default template.

If you simply don't like the links being red - you can use CSS to make them black.