2008/10/12 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
My complaint is not so much that I am pro-linking-the-generic-to-the-specific, so much as I am *against* linking to a generic thing when the sentence has me thinking of a specific thing. I find it upsetting, frustrating, and confusing. I alone am not a statical study, but I've heard from others with the same complaint.
The form of this that always gets me is linking to a single word in a "proper noun phrase" - a set of words that might reasonably be the title of something.
"...at [[Cambridge]] University..."
"...the 17th [[cavalry]] regiment..."
"...[[John Smith]], a Member of [[Parliament]]..."
(exaggerated examples to make it clear)
I'm never entirely clear why these partial-links get made; perhaps to avoid a redlink at the time of creation, or perhaps because it isn't realised that the phrase is a single unit.
Although this might cause some twisty wording in cases where the specific name of something had to be needlessly repeated just for the purpose of anchoring a link.
Isn't this the same problem we sometimes get in the first sentence of an article, where we try to avoid linking title words?
"The '''1972 Ruritanian federal election''' was a [[Federal elections in Ruritania|federal election]] held in 1972 in [[Ruritania]].
I'm not sure if we ever found an elegant way of getting around that sort of problem.