Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Archive/Access Tags on External Links

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

Access Tags on External Links

N Does not require engineering resources

An Inaccessible Website to those who don't have a subscription

Problem: Citations that are only accessible through paid subscriptions or login are marked through the usage of "url-access=". This is useful as members of the community can go through and find these, subsequently fixing the problem so that members can find a more accessible source. Exernal links, however, do not have this option.

Who would benefit: Members of Wikipedia who will be able to find certain links more easily.
Proposed solution: Add syntax to Wikipedia External Links, similar to citations. An example would be this: url=example.org|access=subscription
More comments:
Phabricator tickets:
Proposer: MrMeAndMrMe_{Contributions} 18:06, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think changing the MediaWiki Core syntax for external links is the right solution. Instead, your community should simply create a template to serve this purpose. For example, w:Template:URL on English Wikipedia could be changed so you call it like {{URL|example.org|access=subscription}}. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 18:28, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I think the websites like arxiv already have their own separate templates that do this. Izno (talk) 22:04, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Sites requiring a paid subscription should not be linked in the "External links" section anyway per ELREG. —Dexxor (talk) 13:01, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
True, but also as per ELREG, there is an exception if the link is the topic of the article MrMeAndMrMe_{Contributions} 18:10, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Per above, I'm going to archive this as a template-based solution would seem to make the most sense. It would also be much simpler and quicker to implement, while allowing your community to customize how you handle these URLs (for instance, you may want to put any URL with |access=subscription in a tracking category). Thanks for participating in the survey, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 02:44, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]