The RFC and PMID ones should obviously go away, I think everyone has been wanting this for many years. The ISBN case is a bit more interesting, since it links to Special:BookSources, so interwiki linking can't be used as a replacement. I wonder if it would make more sense to have Extension:BookSources implement a parser function {{isbn:123456789X}} that does the automatic linking. Making people type [[Special:BookSources/123456789X|ISBN 1-23456-789-X]] or whatever is silly, and it seems just as silly to require each and every wiki to create Template:Isbn with the contents [[Special:BookSources/{{{1}}}|ISBN {{{1}}}]].
Topic on Talk:Requests for comment/Future of magic links
"I think everyone has been wanting this for many years." Really? What on Earth leads you to that thought? Did you perhaps ask the editors at the relevant projects? It certainly came as a surprise last month to those at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine/Archive_89#PMID_magic_links
TTO probably meant "everyone" in the sense from a MediaWiki developer perspective. But many of the requests regarding problems with magic links have come from users - see the various bugs linked in the "Problem" section of the RfC.
Do some people actually like magic links? I'm quite surprised. I think most people would agree that they're an anachronistic abomination whose purpose is much better served today by interwiki links (pmid:12345) or custom templates. See MZMcBride's comment at the WPMED talk page.
Additionally, we're talking about a MediaWiki core feature here. Feedback from users at individual MediaWiki installations is certainly useful, but by no means a driver for decisions that are made. There are a wide range of MediaWiki sites out there with a range of different needs, and many of those needs will be able to be better served if the wikitext parser is more rational and less bloated.
Did you not read my post on this page before you made that comment? Yes, some people do like magic links, particularly the ISBN one. And as you have clearly been reading the WP:MED page, and seen objections there as well, I can only assume you are being sarcastic.
No, I'm not being sarcastic. I am genuinely surprised that there are people that want to keep the RFD and/or PMID magic links. (The ISBN ones are kind of a separate issue, as I mentioned in my original post.) I wrote the first part of my comment before reading the talk page discussion.
There's concern on enwiki (here, for example) about the loss of the ISBN and PMID magic links and about the lack of discussion. Can the disabling of the links be halted so that a wider discussion can be held first? People who don't use citation templates, for example, rely on these links.
That sounds pretty reasonable to me. Would we introduce such a parser function in core during the deprecation period before we split Booksources out to a separate extension?
Yes, I think that if we wanted to bring in that parser function, it would have to be brought in straight away, so that wikis could replace their magic links with the parser function straight away.
I am horrified that the ISBN magic link is going. That is so convenient. The ISBN can be pasted straight from gbooks or wherever without having to do any extraneous markup like add curly brackets. That is something I do all the time and taking it away is adding to my workload.
Hi Spinningspark, could you explain how you normally use ISBN links on wikis? Are they going into citation templates? Or as raw text? Or?
I generally don't use citation templates unless I am adding to an article that has them as standard. For articles I write, I construct the references manually. That is very simple for me, the only markup usually needed for a book is a pair of italics markers for the title. If I got it from gbooks everything else can be just pasted in from the book information page. I know going to a template is only four curly brackets and a pipe (so five) extra characters, but I do a lot of this, and having to go back to the beginning of the paste to add curly brackets breaks the flow of typing, I have to take my hands off the keyboard to move the cursor with the mouse. Constructing the bibliography section is the most labour intensive part of writing an article for me. I don't want the workload added to.
I use the ISBN magic link frequently, and would be very sorry to see it disappear. The most common scenario is that in the flow of a paragraph about an author where a book is mentioned I will add the publisher and ISBN in brackets, the date too if not in the flow of the text. The magic linking provides direct access to information sources which verify the book's existence and publication details. ISBN information may well be added by a naive editor who doesn't know about templates etc, but the magic link picks up the most natural presentation and links automatically to this useful resource. On the (infinitesimally?) rare occasions when someone wants to follow "ISBN" by a number which is not an ISBN to be linked, Template:Nbsp does the trick just nicely.