Hi everyone,

The community has long requested the ability to allow Wikidata to use Redirects and the target article as independent sitelinks, so that Wikidata and Wikipedia can be matched more appropriately in complicated cases.

As you may know, you can include sitelinks (also known as interwiki links or interlanguage links) on Wikidata Items that link to Wikipedia pages. Many Wikipedia pages cover more than one subject, so a Redirect may be created to a particular point on the target page, like a section header or an anchor. There is a workaround to do this: You can link to a Redirect page on Wikidata if the page was not a Redirect at the time the link was created. However, you cannot create links to pages that are currently Redirects. Our goal was to provide an official way to solve this. Implementing a solution has unfortunately taken us way longer than we hoped for, mostly because we struggled with the complexity of this topic https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Allow_the_creation_of_links_to_redirects_in_Wikidata#Thoughts_from_Lydia_and_a_way_forward and a fear of ripple effects.

Based on all the input that we got from you, we have now implemented the following functionality:

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After testing is complete, you will be able to directly add a sitelink to a Redirect to an Item if you also add a Redirect badge (sitelink to Redirect (Q70893996), intentional sitelink to Redirect (Q70894304) https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:AvailableBadges) in the same edit. -

It is possible to add a Redirect badge to an existing redirect sitelink. But if you try to remove a Redirect badge from a sitelink that points to a redirected page the edit is rejected. -

Without using a Redirect badge the default behavior stays unchanged: If a Redirect is in place for a sitelink, the default behavior is still to normalize the sitelink (by following the Redirect). If the target of the Redirect is already a sitelink, the sitelink is rejected.

This new functionality is now available for testing on test.wikidata.org https://test.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:AvailableBadges. Please let us know if the current functionality is sufficient, or if the feature needs more work before it can be enabled on Wikidata proper. If you encounter any issues or want to provide feedback, feel free to use this Phabricator ticket https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T278962.

Cheers,