On 12/22/10 3:02 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
I had an interesting discussion a year or two ago with someone about the absence of redlinks in "high-quality" articles - in the past few years, there's been a definite trend to arguing that redlinks are detrimental to a finished article, and should be removed even when an article is pretty much guaranteed to be created eventually. Net result, of course, is that the article is more polished-looking - to us, at least, even if not to a reader unclear on the red/blue distinction - but has marginally less reminders of its editability.
The polished look is a mere superficiality. We should be doing more to encourage editors to wikify articles by creating links to what might be wanted. The red links let it be known that there is still work to be done, and that alone may draw new editors. I find that if I make edits somewhere it is just as easy to create links at the same time.
I suspect this is part of a similar trend!
It reminds me of the spirit of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Always_leave_something_undone
"Whenever you write a page, never finish it. Always leave something obvious to do: an uncompleted sentence, a question in the text (with a not-too-obscure answer someone can supply), wikied links that are of interest, requests for help from specific other Wikipedians, the beginning of a provocative argument that someone simply must fill in, etc. The purpose of this rule is to encourage others to keep working on the wiki."
This too continues to be an important principle, but I would not take it to the extent of compulsory stupidity, Still there is no shame in letting it be obvious that more work and help is needed on an article by someone who has better access to the needed information.
Ec