I think we have to look at what people actually use: overwhelmingly, that is redirects, not labelled section transclusion.

Redirects are lightweight, in terms of editor time, and they do the job.

Transclusion is of course valuable in particular cases; but trying to maintain multiple different contexts for the same material would be quite a headache - tricky to create and maintain, and utterly inflexible if somebody wants to re-shape the article.

The bottom line here is that we should face reality: people are not going to create labelled section transclusions, still less have to put up with maintaining them, just to make wikidata have some more sitelinks.  Realisticly, we would end up with a handful of such transclusions, at most.   Whereas people create redirects every day.


Yes, a redirect is just a redirect.  It's not perfect.  But it's usually good enough.

Take Daniel Havell for instance:
   https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daniel_Havell

the section it points to is recognisably part of a larger article.  In fact it has been written to be part of that larger article, and depends on it for context.  The section is not standalone content.  This is the deal with redirects, one which I do believe readers understand and accept.

Yes, if somebody changed the section name, the redirect would no longer point to the section (unless they had left an anchor). But the redirect would still point to the right article; and given that at best redirects are just redirects, and depend on the rest of the article for context anyway, the less precise link is not *such* a big loss.


The key thing about allowing sitelinks to redirects is that they are the mechanism that is actually used.

The sitelink should point to where on the wiki there is content that matches the actual meaning of the item.  If that happens to be a redirect, so be it.

The best can be the enemy of the good.  I simply do not believe that labelled section transclusions will happen to any great degree; and I think editors would find even those that did to be an endless pain to maintain.  They are not a promise for which it is worth sacrificing the benefits of all the redirects we should and could be sitelinking to.

  -- James.

On 20/10/2014 20:44, Derric Atzrott wrote:

There are major problems using redirects as sitelinks. The top one is
that they do not always point to the concept they should, and even if
they do, there is no guarantee that this redirect will keep pointing
to the same place (normally to a section of another article), since
the section title can change.

Wikipedia supports section labelling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Labeled_section_transclusion

I would support this as a solution.  It seems to solve the issue that using
redirects in site links wishes to solve.

Thank you,
Derric Atzrott


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