The Red Link Replacer is an idea that has been brewing within my head. It would be a powerful, special purpose search-and-replace tool, and would be useful for dealing with two common types of red links: inadvertent Wiki Words, and unnecessary plurals.

The search-and-replace would target Wiki Words and perhaps free links, but leave potholes alone (those really have to be filled in by hand). The replacement would have to have the same letter-for-letter text, but spacing and markup could be predetermined. Examples of how this could work:

• Di Maggio — DiMaggio
• Dead Troper — Dead Troper
• RP Gs — RPGs

I don't know if this tool would be feasible to implement. Thoughts?

While this seems like a good idea -and it would be useful- it'll probably get shot down for being taxing on the system.

Does this mean that things like Team Rocket would always be written as Team Rocket, whether or not they actually refer to that trope?

Cause in that case I'm so against it.

Bumping because I just thought up something like this myself.

Opening this to the public is an obvious mistake, of course; what I was imagining was a system where we (Known tropers) can submit mass wiki text edits and The Powers That Be can choose to approve/ignore them.

Just two text fields—"Old text"/"New text", and a submit button.

• "MGS2" to "[=MGS2=]" or "[[MetalGearSolid MGS2]]"
• "XanatosGambits" to "{{Xanatos Gambit}}s"

And so forth. With this in place, you could do an initial run through of the Frequent Redlinks list and get rid of all those abbreviations.

The Powers That Be could also choose to add the submitted text replacement to an alias list, which would apply the list of replacements to a page each time it is edited. A little more room for complications, but it might be useful, and an attached discussion page (or just Ask The Tropers or something) could be used to point out problems with specific aliases.

edited 6th Sep '09 9:52:48 AM by Citizen

At one point there were a lot of [=RPGs=] with double sets of brackets around them, that showed up as single sets of brackets on the page. It looks like someone might have tried to do something like this and didn't ignore the ones that were already bracketed.

I'm also not sure that RP Gs (or C Ds, or A Is) should be blue anyway. Most people who mention it don't want to link to it; it just comes out that way by accident.