On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
Better would have been fixing it to work better. Not leaving links in the HTML. Sensible defaults for non-logged-in users; most modern browsers send information on the user's language preference, including UK versus US; how much such preferences are accurately set I'm not sure, but it's there.
Agreed. Trouble is, there was foot-dragging going on and no-one really working on it. Then, when date-delinking started and some people started working (or resuming work) on a technical solution, there was too much momentum and the speed of the bot operations almost certainly discouraged those who had been working on technical solutions. Lots of bad-faith assumptions and foot-dragging and forcing "solutions" through.
Once or twice upon a time I suggested adding some kind of non-link links table, so that one can enjoy a functionality similar to whatlinkshere without linking the date (in cases where no link was desired), for data analysis purposes such as dynamically generated timelines (future toolserver project perhaps) and greater ease in populating and maintaining year/month/day articles. Needless to say nobody knew or cared what I was on about.
—C.W.