Charlotte Webb wrote:
On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 3:24 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
But in my view calling an article with two respectable incoming links an "orphan" is quite misleading.
I think the word is used subjectively for any article deemed to need more incoming links because the article's presence is for whatever reason under-represented among the remainder of article-space.
Perhaps a different word should be adopted such as (I don't know) "lonely". But alas one term redirects to the other.
This came up because WikiProject Orphanage has (a) adopted "fewer than three" good incoming links as the standard for orphans, and (b) apparently thinks no one should take down {{orphan}} now unless there are those three links. The Signpost story says half a million articles qualify as "orphan" in this new sense. Therefore, while I'm someone concerned about hypertext issues in general and orphans in particular, I reckon some serious mission creep has been going on. I have found articles that have the couple of good links you'd expect, and yet they are going to be adding to the "backlog" for the foreseeable future. I certainly think there should be one than one template addressing this issue, and preferably a "one or two links" template that only adds a category.
Charles