I can see plenty of Wikimedia and other MediaWiki users happy with this feature.

It would be good to know whether there is a buy in from the Core maintainers or whether they think this should be handled by an extension. A rough idea of the estimated work would be useful too. It sounds like a potential candidate for http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects

PS: found thanks to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Triage/20130307

Thanks to Daniel Friesen for pointing out that https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CreateRedirect exists.

(In reply to comment #2)

Thanks to Daniel Friesen for pointing out that
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CreateRedirect exists.

Right. This bug is about MediaWiki core, though.

Can someone elaborate on some of the most common use cases for creating redirects to give a bit more background to this for new users not as familiar.

Also, is this a band aid? do we need to step back and think about the reason redirects are created in the first place? Does mediawiki support the concept of page aliases? Does the redirected page need to continue to exist as a regular wikipage after the redirect has happened?

swalling wrote:

(In reply to comment #4)

Also, is this a band aid? do we need to step back and think about the reason
redirects are created in the first place? Does mediawiki support the concept
of
page aliases? Does the redirected page need to continue to exist as a regular
wikipage after the redirect has happened?

Yes, I think the redirected page should exist as a regular wikipage after the redirect has happened. This allows any editor to un-redirect something without needing a special form or other interface, edit the redirect easily, etc.

Consider this real case from English Wikipedia:

• Someone originally made "Deforestation in Brazil" a redirect to the Deforestation section in Amazon Rainforest. This isn't bad, but they're not actually aliases of each other precisely. This happens more than you'd think.
• Later, someone un-redirected Deforestation in Brazil, and expanded it to be a large independent article. This was made easy by the fact that redirects are still wiki pages. Otherwise, there'd have to be new background processes to re-make a redirect as a wiki page.

Part of the challenges with the current implementation, which involves using somewhat arcane markup, will be solved by VisualEditor.

(In reply to comment #4)

Can someone elaborate on some of the most common use cases for creating
redirects to give a bit more background to this for new users not as
familiar.

Also, is this a band aid? do we need to step back and think about the reason
redirects are created in the first place? Does mediawiki support the concept
of
page aliases? Does the redirected page need to continue to exist as a regular
wikipage after the redirect has happened?

[[m:Help:Redirect]] contains the necessary educational material for the topic.