It's doing this because "foo|bar" is not a valid title. You meant to create a link to "foo" with text "bar"; the current way to do this with the dialog is to write "foo", select that, open the dialog and change the link text there.

I hate all this unnecessary complicated stuff. We had a button doing exatly the service I want in the old editing interface.
(I don't object adding possibilities, even adding "Are you sure" & "... damn sure?" popups as users want them, but I want simple things simple, and not loose good working functionality)

mhershberger wrote:

Unassigning default assignments. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/54734

Still valid, but lowest priority. Moving to WikiEditor.

Ideally, and again under dialog mode, if a user were to highlight südpfälzische Dialekte|südpfälzischen Dialekte then invoke the link dialog, content to the left of the | separator should be auto-populated into the Target page or URL: field while the content to the right of the separator should be auto-populated into the Text to display: field.

What happens now is everything highlighted -- including the separator -- is auto-populated to both fields.

While it may be nice to have the link dialog be that intuitive, if you're fluent enough to be building complex, internal and/or anchored wiki-links, why in blazes would you go through the hassle of using the link dialog vs link-button in the first place? Personally I wouldn't even consider this a bug -- more like a requested enhancement.

We want to accommodate new and non-Wikitext users. That needs to be done in a logical way.