Michael Peel wrote:
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.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of the undivided editing
box and
simplicity. I'm not also not really cut out to be a strategy wonk - too
much to do right now, at least. But the "second decade" of WP is only
around nine months off, and I hear various ideas circulating. Some of
what is "up in the air" may be the future.
If I start thinking about the data structure that would support a bot
putting in language interwiki links, it seems that (although it might be
a bit untidy in practical terms) it is close to being something with
interesting potential. If it wasn't private to a bot, but a WMF project
in itself: wouldn't it provide a focus for all sorts of metadata
collection, as well as collection of a web directory (Wikipedia doesn't
do that, but it could happen elsewhere), bibliographical data, no doubt
other things? Magnus Manske talks to me about such things every time we
meet. We have got close to a standard "footer" organisation for WP pages
(such as Works/See also/References/Further reading/External
links/Attribution/Categories/Interwiki). It would take a bit of thinking
of matters the other way round, but having other "views" possible in
which the main body of the article was presented with a footer according
to some preference options, only References being standard, sounds
fairly interesting to me.
This thread started really because WP:EL seems now to want external
links to be minimal, driving people to place relevant links in
References (for which they'd have to develop the article to justify the
link). I understand where that kind of thinking comes from, but all
stick and no carrot makes Jack a dull boy. Hence my interest in other
options.
Charles