Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Editing/Unintentional false links in VE

Random proposal ►◄ Editing The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Unintentional false links in VE

Problem: When user changes a link anchor in the text, the link target doesn't change, and there is no warning for that. The surface is not intuitive enough, therefore beside many newcomers even experienced editors make this mistake. Since trusted user's edits are not patrolled systematically, these edits stay long time in the text (and often not easy to discover them), hurt the reputation of Wikipedia and feelings and attitude of editors to VE (=VisualEditor) (so much that part of the community is repeatedly propose to disable VE and try to block any further implementation of VE).
Who would benefit: readers, editors, partrollers
Proposed solution: some kind of warning
More comments: This request is basically a resubmission of a wish from 2019 (resulted on place 59th of 212 last year)
Phabricator tickets: T56947 (related, solved ticket: T55973)
Proposer: ~~Samat (talk) 11:49, 29 November 2020 (UTC)~~ Taken over by Tacsipacsi (talk) 10:54, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

I'm not sure that I understand this one, Tacsipacsi. Is it about the process for changing the link label? When I place the insertion point in a link to edit it, I see the target in the pop-up card. Pelagic (talk) 10:49, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Pelagic: Yes, you understand the point of this proposal correctly. The target is visible on the card, but apparently this is not enough, there are plenty of edits changing only either the text or the target (mostly the former), for example here or here. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 18:32, 20 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Tacsipacsi: Maybe if the Text line at the bottom of the card was editable, and disallow changing it on the main editing surface? I always found it disconcerting to click Change text on the card then have the focus jump back onto the page like nothing happened. (Though my own preference would be to be able to change it in either place.)

If we were to show all the link targets in-line à la wikitext, then that would go against WYSIWYG and affect line wrapping. Pelagic (talk) 01:56, 21 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Pelagic: I have no idea what the right solution would be. The good thing about CWS is that I don’t need to know it, either. When someone at WMF picks up this wish, they will do the necessary user tests and other user experience design tasks. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 20:02, 22 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Support ValeJappo 【〒】 18:40, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support original proposer Samat (talk) 19:02, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Matěj Suchánek (talk) 19:21, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 19:23, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support CrystallineLeMonde (talk) 20:15, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Stryn (talk) 20:16, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Teemeah (talk) 20:39, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Gabrasca (talk) 21:37, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support YFdyh000 (talk) 23:33, 8 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Hanif Al Husaini (talk) 00:55, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Munfarid1 (talk) 09:48, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Thomas Kinz (talk) 10:09, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support JAn Dudík (talk) 11:00, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Kaybeesquared (talk) 14:17, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Srđan (talk) 18:11, 10 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Libcub (talk) 19:02, 10 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support — Bilorv (talk) 09:12, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Strong support BoldLuis (talk) 15:07, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Bencemac (talk) 16:09, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Pahunkat (talk) 20:44, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Tgr (talk) 08:10, 13 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support β₁₆ - (talk) 16:11, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Yes, this introduces hard-to-detect problems. The feature should detect both inconsistencies (changing the link target or changing the link text), but there are more difficult cases, e.g. an editor changing [[1990 in music|1990]] → [[1990 in music|1991]]… --Mormegil (cs) 08:32, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support RanuKanu (talk) 09:09, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support — Draceane ^talk_contrib. 12:59, 15 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 17:05, 17 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Golmore (talk) 11:04, 18 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Support Wotheina (talk) 05:58, 21 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]