On 2 Apr 2010, at 11:21, Charles Matthews wrote:
Carcharoth wrote:
On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 9:05 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Samuel Klein wrote:
- interlanguage and interproject links to a set of articles
about the same topic
On the final point, the "poster" style of interwiki link to sister projects begins to look dated, at least to me. It obviously doesn't scale well; or in other words it puts the onus on the project linked to, to organise the material relevant to one WP topic, in such a way that a single link can carry the whole weight. Innovation is at least possible.
That's an interesting point. I presume you mean wikisource here. For Commons and Wikiquote (I'm unsure about the other projects) it is fairly easy to have a corresponding page or category or both. If the Wikipedia article is a person who is an author, then a wikisource page is possible, and if the Wikipedia page is about a book or other published work that could be on wikisource, then again a single link, page or category is usually possible. But there are some articles where this system does fall down. I presume the place to put links to editorially selected wikisource pages would be in the external links, or as a courtesy link in a citation.
Yes, Wikisource is on my mind in particular, but there are a couple of points here. Some work could be done (perhaps I'm not up-to-date, though) with stacking those poster boxes more successfully: they are more eye-catching than really convenient.
I'm really not fond of the poster boxes in their current form at all. It's far too easy for them to clutter up a page. As a suggestion, what about something like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40-foot_telescope Look at the infobox. While you're at the page, also look at the bottom - that's my preferred way of dealing with external links. ;-)
That doesn't solve the issue of multiple links being needed, but IMO it does make the links look a lot better and in a more relevant place. I would expect that most multiple links to Wikisource would/ should be in the references, though - although the same probably wouldn't be true for wikinews links.
There are three kinds of template: poster, citation and attribution, and it is really more elegant to use the citation links in the external links section, if more than one is relevant. The Wikisource category system is not really developed enough to do the task right now; its dab system likewise (and it is supposed to disambiguate texts, really); and the Wikisource: namespace plays a surrogate role for a "topic" namespace (rather than being just project pages). But enough of our troubles.
I think that's just Wikisource's growing pains; over time I think it will probably end up with more disambig pages and also topic pages. But perhaps that's just my viewpoint as I'm used to Wikipedia.
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.
Mike