On 2/8/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
I hope this is an 'urban myth' kind of thing.
There are plenty of reasons
to use 'Lord Byron', rather than George Gordon, 6th Earl of Byron, or
whatever he is. Don't even get me started on [[Montesquiou]]. Piped links
are there to serve man, not the other way round.
You're probably right, but what reasons specifically?
And another thing. Suppose pages get subdivided, quite reasonably, in a
process of natural growth. (We may have started with [[Sonny and Cher]] and
redirected [[Sonny Bono]] to it then, but now Sonny, Cher, Sonny&Cher are to
be three pages.) Then you may hope that Sonny Bono, which was a redirect,
but now is going to be a page on its own, has not been changed to Sonny&Cher
in all sorts of piped link by officious people.
Ah, that's quite a good example. Probably in many cases the link could
originally point to [Sonny and Cher#Sonny Bono] or something.
I was thinking of cases like differences in American/British
terminology (lift/elevator, cock (chicken)/rooster) etc, where it
makes no sense to retain links to the redirect. Examples where the
link points to some specific aspect of a more general topic are a
reasonable exception I suppose.
Steve