On 11/13/08, Jay Litwyn brewhaha@edmc.net wrote:
I mean that some publications hav a feature about what happened on this day in 1986, etc.
Oh yes, definitely, and to the point of negating the argument that such pages are "indiscriminate collections of information".[1]
If the date on an article is a link to some page that is robotic, then maybe it could read something like a concordance -- one sentence from every article containing that date, click on a button to get article titles.
That's actually a good idea, and it shouldn't be that hard to do on the toolserver. Surely it would some new database tables to be efficient, and there would still need to be some kind of standard link syntax to distinguish a date from a poorly worded sentence which coincidentally looks like a date.[2]
But imagine being able to click on a date link and see all other events which happened on that exact date, or within the calendar week of that year, or in the seven-day period centered on that day (given day +/- 0-3 days), or on that calendar day/week/month but only within a certain decade, or during a given country's "election years" within a certain century, or any of these options but filtered to events related to bluegrass music or ice hockey or Portuguese literature, etc., etc. without having to edit or create any pages.
For me the only risk would be spending more time browsing around in this than actually editing.
I only followed a date link once, and some interesting things were there, so I can't say I know much about what can be done with date links. So, I guess my question is...does every editor want their dates automatically linked?
The current mass delinking is evidence that this is a silly question.
Maybe it should be a user preferences option.
I agree and I've suggested this on a number of occasions to no avail.
—C.W.
[1] Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/March_1 [2] A few examples here (more on request) http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2008-October/095989.html