Wikipedia talk:Red link

Although the article states that, unlike on the German Wikipedia, an article for Richard J. Youle has not been created as of August 2024, User:Bestdragonfuit appears to have translated the German article in 2023 to create Richard Youle. Could someone update/correct this? AdamM (talk) 14:09, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

If you can think of a better example in Wikipedia:Red link#Red links and interlanguage links, then you can fix it yourself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:21, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

I went ahead and changed it to the French explorer and writer Adolphe d'Assier. —Carter (Tcr25) (talk) 18:11, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:28, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Summarize Timeline Fact Check

For many years, Wikipedia:Database reports/Transclusions of non-existent templates, or a similar report, has listed transclusions of templates that do not exist. A few editors have routinely patrolled this report in order to fix typos in templates, copy-paste templates from other Wikipedias that do not exist here, vandalism, erroneous edits, and more. The basis for these edits, which I give in my edit summaries when I fix these problems, is WP:REDNOT.

The report currently scans all pages on the English Wikipedia, including user sandboxes, and has always done so, as far as I know. A couple of us have gotten pushback from editors asking us to leave their sandboxes alone, which may be a reasonable request.

Should WP:REDNOT apply to user sandboxes, or should they be explicitly excluded from the guideline and the database report? As a bonus, if someone knows how to modify the SQL in the report to exclude user sandbox pages, that would be useful to know how to do. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:27, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

User sandboxes should be left alone where possible. If that isn't common sense, it should be added to the guideline explicitly. —Kusma (talk) 14:39, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

I am also interested in a method for explicitly excluding sandboxes from the database reports. until that happens, I agree that user sandboxes should be left alone where possible, but minimal changes to disable/fix transclusions of missing templates should be allowed where it doesn't disrupt sandbox work. Frietjes (talk) 15:09, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

I like the idea of excluding subpages in the User: namespace. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:37, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

I thought of that option as well, since editors often create sandbox-style pages in their user spaces when they are drafting new or translated articles. Do we care if people use nonexistent templates on their root User pages? The report often contains transclusions of nonexistent userboxes, for example, like this one; if there is consensus to ignore those as well, I can't currently think of a reason why that would be a problem. The only edge case for me would be a nonexistent template in a User subpage, and that user subpage is then transcluded outside of that user's own space. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:04, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

My SQL skills are mediocre, but I have added one line of code to the report that appears to exclude transclusions of nonexistent templates in User space pages. I think this is a reasonable path forward. If it causes trouble, maybe someone will post on the report's talk page or on this talk page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:41, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

I have also added a rather long note about this situation, since it may come up again, and I didn't want to lose the nuance of this conversation. It seemed too long to put into the body of the page, which was otherwise nice, concise bullets. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:47, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

Given that red links in an article have a specific meaning (i.e. non-existant pages), should Template:St. Louis Cardinals 1979 NFL draft picks (and most of not all of the templates to which it also links) be manually formatting valid wiki-links to be red? — Fourthords | =Λ= | 01:06, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

You might be interested in reading Template talk:Infobox person#RFC: Should color headings be removed from all person infoboxes from last month, and @Zackmann08 might be interested in the example you found. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:58, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: thank you for the ping. Appreciate you!

@Fourthords: that is an example of terrible user experience. I have removed the red coloring. That code does only show up for templates (not in actual articles) but that is a definite no-no. Appreciate you finding that! Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 03:31, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

@Awesome Aasim: It seems that your change in Special:Diff/1350634336 to make redlink example without actually using "broken" link did not work (at least for me). I.e. it show as regular blue link. Would you care to revert, or fix it more properly?

See image:

Mnalis (talk) 21:20, 23 April 2026 (UTC)

Maybe it's some CSS shenanigans because when I previewed the link was red for me. Perhaps it can be resolved with a templatestyles? Aasim (話す（はなす）) 00:31, 24 April 2026 (UTC)

Or perhaps it had something to do with different skin being used byy different users? Anyway, it has been solved by another user reverting it, which is IMHO just fine, as the destination page is protected from creation, so people won't be able to mistakenly create it anymore... Mnalis (talk) 05:18, 28 April 2026 (UTC)