On 9/5/07, zetawoof zetawoof@gmail.com wrote:
How about only converting links which lack label text, then? "[http://url/]" would get turned into an inline reference of the form "<ref>http://url</ref>", while a "labeled" link of the form "[http://url/ link text]" would still generate an inline link. There are some articles where an inline link is actually desired (a link to a web site in an article about the site, for example, or pretty much anything outside article space) - but they should be labeling their links anyways.
What'd be even nicer would be falling back to the original link behavior (or some variant thereof) if there's no <references/> tag present in the page. I don't have a strong understanding of the parser, so I don't know if this would be possible to implement cleanly. It seems like the nicest possible solution, though - as talk and project pages lack <references/> tags, they fall back to numbered links, which is desirable.
This seems most reasonable to me. Any other behavior that involves automatically converting links to references would make noticeboards and talk pages unwieldy when it comes to things like diff links, etc. I think I would go bat-loopy insane in short order if every time I went to help out at WQA and want to see a diff I had to click to jump the page down to the references section and then click a second time to open the diff (not to mention that it would make a page like WQA, which already is often > 200 KB even longer by creating a references section. There's currently 74 un-labelled links on that page).
--Darkwind