Steve Bennett wrote:
On 6/29/06, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
A redlink might just be a mistake, so briefly search for an existing article. If it seems it could be a viable article it should be left alone. I think it should continue to be a redlink until someone is ready to write an article rather than being made into a stub.
But if someone is looking for information on a book, is it not more useful to make that book a redirect to the author, where at least the one liner "John Foo is best known for his brilliant book, Foo Strikes Again, which is all about ...." is better than nothing.
I firmly believe that Wikipedia's mission is to answer the question "What the hell is X?" to whatever extent it can, rather than just give up and say "no, we don't know either". Even if all we have time to write is "It's a book, check out these three urls".
This becomes irritating when you're going the other way---you've just read the article about the author, and now are going down the list of books at the bottom looking to read more. If some articles exist and some don't, you can click on the blue links and get articles, and know from the red links that no article exists on those books yet. The situation is considerably more confusing if they're all blue links, but some are articles while others redirect right back to the page you just read.
-Mark