Click a red link and nothing opens. Wikipedia renders a wikilink in red the moment it points at a title with no article behind it yet — a dead end, strictly speaking, except the project treats it as useful rather than broken. Blue means a page exists. Red means an editor, somewhere, expected one to.
The message reaches us every few weeks, worded differently each time: "Our CEO is already linked from the trade association's board page, red though it is — doesn't that count for something?" It counts for exactly one thing: whoever wrote that board page expected an article to exist someday. It does not count as evidence that independent sources have written about the CEO at the length Wikipedia's notability guideline requires.
The essay editors cite for this, WP:REDNOT, says it directly: a red link is not evidence of notability. Anyone can create a link to a name with no article yet — a list of directors, a sports roster, a filmography, a cabinet reshuffle — without ever checking whether that name could pass the general notability guideline. The link only records an editor's expectation, not a source's output.
A red link records an editor's expectation, not a source's output.
Red links do carry weight inside the project, just not the weight people assume. WikiProject Red Link Recovery and the various "most-wanted articles" lists rank titles by how many pages already link to them, on the theory that heavy internal demand marks a gap worth filling. That's a prioritization tool for volunteers deciding where to spend an afternoon. Whether the subject actually meets the notability guideline is a question the list doesn't answer. A title with forty incoming red links and zero independent coverage records forty editors' optimism, nothing about coverage anyone has found.
Turning the link blue doesn't settle the question either. We've seen articles built mainly to answer a red link — a subsidiary, a board member, a minor award — hit speedy deletion within the hour, or survive the speedy only to lose at an AfD a month later, because the sourcing was exactly what it had been before anyone wrote a word. The colour of the link changes. The sourcing underneath it, or its absence, does not.
The honest answer, when someone sends us a red link, is to go looking for what would need to exist to turn it blue safely: two or three independent publications that wrote about the subject at some length, not a mention inside a list the subject's own organisation helped populate. If that coverage exists, the red link called it correctly. If it doesn't, the red link is just a sentence someone else wrote, still waiting on evidence nobody has supplied yet.
