On 2 Apr 2010, at 11:21, Charles Matthews wrote:
Carcharoth wrote:
On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 9:05 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
Samuel Klein wrote:
* interlanguage and interproject links to a set
of articles
about the
same topic
On the final point, the "poster" style of interwiki link to
sister
projects begins to look dated, at least to me. It obviously doesn't
scale well; or in other words it puts the onus on the project
linked to,
to organise the material relevant to one WP topic, in such a way
that a
single link can carry the whole weight. Innovation is at least
possible.
That's an interesting point. I presume you mean wikisource here. For
Commons and Wikiquote (I'm unsure about the other projects) it is
fairly easy to have a corresponding page or category or both. If the
Wikipedia article is a person who is an author, then a wikisource
page
is possible, and if the Wikipedia page is about a book or other
published work that could be on wikisource, then again a single link,
page or category is usually possible. But there are some articles
where this system does fall down. I presume the place to put links to
editorially selected wikisource pages would be in the external links,
or as a courtesy link in a citation.
Yes, Wikisource is on my mind in particular, but there are a couple of
points here. Some work could be done (perhaps I'm not up-to-date,
though) with stacking those poster boxes more successfully: they are
more eye-catching than really convenient.
I'm really not fond of the poster boxes in their current form at all.
It's far too easy for them to clutter up a page. As a suggestion,
what about something like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40-foot_telescope
Look at the infobox. While you're at the page, also look at the
bottom - that's my preferred way of dealing with external links. ;-)
That doesn't solve the issue of multiple links being needed, but IMO
it does make the links look a lot better and in a more relevant
place. I would expect that most multiple links to Wikisource would/
should be in the references, though - although the same probably
wouldn't be true for wikinews links.
There are three kinds of
template: poster, citation and attribution, and it is really more
elegant to use the citation links in the external links section, if
more
than one is relevant. The Wikisource category system is not really
developed enough to do the task right now; its dab system likewise
(and
it is supposed to disambiguate texts, really); and the Wikisource:
namespace plays a surrogate role for a "topic" namespace (rather than
being just project pages). But enough of our troubles.
I think that's just Wikisource's growing pains; over time I think it
will probably end up with more disambig pages and also topic pages.
But perhaps that's just my viewpoint as I'm used to Wikipedia.
There does seem to be a possibility for a bit of
lateral thinking
here.
If, say, the current external links and interwiki sections were
done by
transclusion from something separately maintained (a set of pages
organised by both language and topic?), how could that be implemented,
and how could it relate to efforts to make hard-copy bibliography more
modular?
That sounds like a way of adding confusion to those editing a page,
when they find that part of the page is stored somewhere else
completely. Interwiki (as in language) links seem to be dealt with
well nowadays by robots; expanding that to include wikisource links
might be good. External links are best done as project-specific ones
IMO, though.
Mike