On 11/11/08, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
Oh, OK. Do you know:
(a) When autoformatting first started?
Roughly five years ago (but maybe earlier if "new date formatter" implies the replacement of an "old date formatter"):
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=rev&revision=2024
(b) Whether year or date linking was being done before date autoformatting started?
Most likely. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ayn_Rand&direction=next&ol... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bob_Dylan&oldid=237979 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_W._Bush&oldid=8574528
Agree. Though human audits using scripts work quite well if the human has clue.
<big>IF</big>
Not so sure about this. The articles can still be accessed through the calendar templates and the category system. Instead of clicking on the year link, you click one of the date-related categories, and navigate your way to the relevant date page that way.
That would be put the Y/M/D chronology articles one step closer to being a walled garden unto themselves, and this isn't Wikia.
It is a fair point that not everyone will want to do this, so not having the dates linked from the main text of an article as default is a good thing there (I think links in infoboxes and tables and lists are different).
Well, I don't enjoy copying and pasting things into the search box any more than I would calculating my age with an abacus or a slide-rule.
I'm actually rather sympathetic to the notion that link-quality in the main body of the text of an article is improved if it is kept to the most relevant links.
Hmm, no chance we could establish a "link value" threshold to satisfy all areas of the elitist editor vs. curious reader spectrum? I suppose the software could establish a default based on a number of factors. Google seems to perform a vaguely similar task quite well, but rather than being our own worst enemy we would want something which could be over-ridden on various case-by-case bases. Wouldn't affect me as I'd prefer to see all the links anyway.
In other words, the links act as a carefully selected mix of background articles and sister and daughter articles.
Ah, but what about the aunts and uncles and roommates and next-door neighbors and bastard children? Somebody, please think of... No, seriously I think this approach would only create an artificial hierarchy of topics.
I use whatlinkshere a lot, and I agree with you that it can be very useful. There are other ways to generate the same "metadata" (e.g. articles with a certain year mentioned) without using links.
This would only work if there was a fool-proof way to determine whether a 3- or 4-digit number is a year or a death count or a number of feet above sea level. Last month Greg proposed an alternative solution which could probably handle this with the features I suggested.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2008-October/096001.html
Changing subject completely, one of my big gripes is the way that bloated templates stuck at the bottom of an article pollute "whatlinkshere" with irrelevant links. For example, although hardly any of the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry are mentioned in the main text of Marie Curie, they are all in the "whatlinkshere" list because each Nobel Laureate has all the Nobel Laureates listed in a template at the bottom of each article. Indeed, every single Nobel Laureate in Chemistry appears in the "whatlinkshere" list for each Laureate. If instead of the template, there was a link to a list, or a link to a category, then "whatlinkshere" would be much cleaner and could actually be checked carefully to see if all the links are being used correctly. Ditto for listing the outgoing links. If links from transcluded templates could be semantically distinguished from links from the actual articles, that would be great.
In principle, could that be done?
It could be done with the current software, by modifying the navbox templates to use a different type of link, but you'd also lose the black/bold format for links pointing the page you're currently on.
Some kind of script to subtract one whatlinkshere list from another will probably show up on the toolserver soon enough. It could also be done with the API, but it would take me a while to figure out how. Let me know if you're serious about this.
—C.W.