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Special:Badtitle should not have class="new"
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Description

Wikilinks to the special page, Special:Badtitle, are being styled with class "new" - although this is a valid target.

Example:
https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SpecialBadTitle&oldid=449380

Please remove the class styling when this wikilink is parsed

Event Timeline

Special:Badtitle is not really a conventional special page, it's just an adhoc error page. It makes sense to make it blue though, since it has viewable content.

Is there a way do make it blue? F.Y.I. Special:Badtitle is red not just in Wikipedia, but red in about every single project.

@Gioguch that is what this request will do, it is "red" because it has the "new" class on it, it shouldn't need that class

Is there a way do make it blue? F.Y.I. Special:Badtitle is red not just in Wikipedia, but red in about every single project.

If you want fix it, you can propose a patch. FYI this needs to be done in includes/Title.php

There's some info on Gerrit/Tutorial. You can also use Gerrit Patch Uploader tool.

Change 650086 had a related patch set uploaded (by Ammarpad; owner: Ammarpad):
[mediawiki/core@master] Consider SpecialBadtitle as always known

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/650086

Special:Badtitle is not really a conventional special page, it's just an adhoc error page. It makes sense to make it blue though, since it has viewable content.

I disagree. The link is broken, it does not refer to a page.

The fact that a link target has viewable content does not mean the link should be blue. Point in case, a category that doesn't have a category page but does have pages in the category has viewable content, but a red link. And that's how it should be, I believe.

I don't understand the problem this solves. In what context does a link show up referencing a bad title, and you would want it to be blue?

The report at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_140#Incorrect_appearance_of_badtitletext seems to discuss an entirely different problem: The link https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ghazanfar_Ali_Abbasi&curid=47816824&diff=681046280&oldid=681044588 shows the Badtitletext message, even though the Title is not bad at all. The revision is bad (deleted). This should result in a different error being shown.

The same is true for the link in the ticket's description: https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SpecialBadTitle&oldid=449380 has a valid title (SpecialBadTitle). But the revision is suppressed and can't be show. It would be nice to show a helpful message explaining this, rather than the unhelpful link to Special:Badtitle. Making that link blue would not improve the situation. The link doesn't lead anywhere.

@daniel more plainly, this link is styled with class=new, but it does not lead to a new page creation process; that is why it shouldn't be styled as such

@daniel more plainly, this link is styled with class=new, but it does not lead to a new page creation process; that is why it shouldn't be styled as such

So you think that [[Special:Barfoo]] should be blue, because Special:Barfoo cannot be created? Is there consensus on this in the community? I seems to me that the link should be red, because the link is bad.

As to the page in the task description: https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SpecialBadTitle&oldid=449380 should not have a link to Special:badtitle at all. It should instead show a message indicating that the revision is deleted.

Change 650086 abandoned by Ammarpad:
[mediawiki/core@master] Consider SpecialBadtitle as always known

Reason:

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/650086

I have no comment on Special:Barfoo or other invalid names in general - simply that this particular link is certainly never going to trigger the "new page" workflow, and is otherwise a valid Special page that does display a message (MediaWiki:badtitletext)

Krinkle subscribed.

Agreed with Daniel. This seems rather theoretical, but I'm open to hearing otherwise if and when there is a real-world example of regular content or other project pages linking to Special:Badtitle in a way that isn't an accident.

I appreciate that the special page "Badtitle" is valid unlike other made up special pages. But it is intentional and by design that this one special page is considered non-existent (unlike all other valid page names). The reason is that this page name is used as proxy for when a page name is invalid. In that case we internally translate it to "Badtitle" which thus would need to be a red link.

Perhaps an alternate direction would be to remove whatever exists today that is leading people to think that Special:Badtitle is worthy of being linked to, since that seems like the larger problem in my opinion and may be the source of the confusion that led to this.