Community Wishlist/W260/Votes
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Support Enwiki has a style rule called en:WP:ANCHORSUBST that is being applied everywhere right now. It fixes some accessibility, mobile, and edit summary issues with anchors, but results in extremely ugly, extremely verbose wikicode. Example diff. This wish would solve that. Novem Linguae (talk) 13:40, 14 December 2025
Support Yeah, that would be helpful, the current syntax is unreadable and unintuitive. Gawaon (talk) 14:33, 14 December 2025
Support Oh please, do something about section link rot, that's such a pain in the ass. When I see a section link in an article, I immediately suspect that it won't be working and really often end up being right. There should be an automatic mechanism in place to make sure anchor links don't break as the articles develop. This proposal seems to be a good one. JWBTH (talk) 15:00, 14 December 2025
Support Badly needed. With the source editor, the uninitiated may think they're seeing stray markup that doesn't belong on Wikipedia. Worse, with Visual Editor, the anchor doesn't appear at all and editing the header can delete the anchor, quite unknowingly (e.g. [1]). NebY (talk) 15:03, 17 December 2025
Support This would prevent a lot of problems. It would be great if it could work as JWBTH suggests. I followed a link here from Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. (talk) 18:23, 14 December 2025 (UTC) SchreiberBike (talk) 18:25, 14 December 2025reply
Support Second @NebY and @JWBTH re: section anchor maintenance and link rot. Fixing section link rot would require additional tooling to flag edits that break incoming section links. Preimage (talk) 15:09, 30 January 2026
Support Absolutely. ANCHORSUBST is ugly. Let's get rid of that. HouseBlaster (talk) 06:46, 7 February 2026
Support Dingolover6969 (talk) 11:08, 31 May 2026
Support Locke Cole (talk) 00:59, 27 June 2026