On a site such as the English Wikipedia, editors often create redirects for misspelled versions of page titles so that readers can have an easier time accessing the content they're after. For example, if a reader enters "Barrack Obama" or "Dave Chapelle" or "Steve Carrell" into the search bar, they'll be redirected automatically to "Barack Obama" or "Dave Chappelle" or "Steve Carell" (respectively) automatically. This is a good thing.
However, these redirects can be problematic when editors insert this text into a page in the form of a link and don't get any feedback that the text they've entered is a misspelling (that it's likely wrong and not the text they intended to insert). In fact, the user gets the opposite feedback: they get feedback (a blue link) indicating that they've inserted an appropriate, working link.
These misspelled redirects can be tagged with templates such as "{{R from misspelling}}" which generally automatically categorize them.
I'm not sure what the appropriate behavior here is. I believe that continuing to allow users to insert links to misspelled words or phrases unknowingly is a bug and should be addressed somehow.
There are a few options here, but I'm curious to read what others think about this. The goal here is to reduce the number of misspelled links that are added to a page by giving the user warning or notice that they've tried to insert a misspelled link (e.g., [[Hilary Clinton]] or [[Stephen Spielberg]]).
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/Linked_misspellings
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13595