Requested feature overview description.
When someone attempts to create a new tag alias, the tag alias page should check the "Reason" box for phrases like "same artist" and "same person". If any of those phrases are found, it should refuse to let the new alias be submitted, until the user adds at least one or two off-site links to the "Reason" box.

Why would it be useful?
A lot of people seem to post "same artist" alias requests without linking to any profiles of the artist in question. This causes e621 staff or other users to dig around on FA, Twitter, Internet Archive, etc, to confirm that the names given are actually the same person. This change would put the burden of proof on the alias proposer, rather than the staff.

Possible drawbacks:

If you force the alias proposer to include an offsite link before the proposal is accepted, they might just fill in https://google.com/ or similar to pass the check.

Automated parsing of natural language is always tough. Collecting all the phrases to look for may take a while. Also, people might try things like "sam3 art1st" to fool the parsing and bypass the link requirement.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?
The new tag alias page.

I like this idea.

+1 Every time I see a request without a link, I am annoyed, and I don't even want to look up if it is correct or not.

It occurred to me that if people are requesting an alias like this, then there is probably some art already posted on e621 under one of the names in the request.

Maybe once the "this is a name change alias" detector has fired, e621 should look up the wiki page and/or the artist page (if available) for both names, and at least provide links to those pages, either edited into the original post, or as a follow-up post to the request.

If there's an artist page, it might even be appropriate for e621 to pull the "URLs" and "Domains" section from the artist page, and include those in the tag request thread, either edited into the OP or as a follow-up.

The idea here is to present all the information e621 already has in one place on the alias request thread, so it's easier and faster to investigate, if needed.

Also, some more possible phrases to look for: "changed their name", "changed his name", "changed her name".

I thought of a version of this that's not as strong, but might be easier to implement.

Requested feature overview description.
When someone tries to create a new tag alias, the tag alias page should check both the "from" and "to" tags, to see if either or both of them are currently marked as an artist tag. If so, the page should display some help text, possibly directly above or directly below the "Reason" box, to remind the requester to add verification links.

The help text might read something like this:

It looks like you might be requesting an alias for an artist who has changed names. If that's true, please include some off-site links where the artist has said something like "CoolArtist1 was my old name, but I will use GreatArtist1000 from now on", or similar.

"Off-site" means "not on e621 itself". Often this means a link to an artist's profile/bio, journal, or tweet on FurAffinity, Twitter, Weasyl, SoFurry, etc.

Including the links helps the e621 staff verify that the two names really do belong to the same artist.

Why would it be useful?
A lot of people seem to post "same artist" alias requests without linking to any profiles of the artist in question. This causes e621 staff or other users to dig around on FA, Twitter, Internet Archive, etc, to confirm that the names given are actually the same person. This change would hopefully get the alias proposer to include some links in their initial request, making the verification process easier for e621 staff.

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?
The new tag alias page.

kora_viridian said:
If you force the alias proposer to include an offsite link before the proposal is accepted, they might just fill in https://google.com/ or similar to pass the check.

Entering a false/irrelevant URL could just be against the rules and net them a warning

Artist Name Aliases already crowd up so much of the tag alias/implication suggestion forum, having artist name aliases that require mods to do work to see whether they should approve it or not slows down the process even more.