On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Bod Notbod bodnotbod@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
It would be a service to our readers to end this practice entirely: if a link is good enough to be hidden on a talk page (supposedly in the interests of incorporating it in the future*), then it is good enough to put at the end of External Links or a Further Reading section, and our countless thousands of readers will not be deprived of the chance to make use of it.
Not to either agree or disagree with this but I wrote a substantial amount about the artist [[Rachel Whiteread]] years ago and through my research found out about a ton of works she'd done that I didn't feel merited inclusion. So I documented them on the talk page and I drew the conclusion that although they would overwhelm the article some article readers would be interested in the list.
But you shouldn't treat the talk page as an external place to link to. The article should be self-contained.
So I placed a link to the talk page in the links section with a note explaining about the list that could be viewed there. Someone removed the link and the explanation saying that either the talk page information was good enough to be included in the article or it wasn't good enough to be noted in the article space. I didn't fight it, but thought it a poor decision.
Linking from the article to the talk page is a violation of SELFREF. If you want to include appendix-type material, that is bset placed in it's own section at the end of the article, in a collapse box or footnote that makes clear it is not part of the main article, but an adjunct to it. A bit like an infobox is an adjunct, like a footer template is an adjunct, just like the styles and children bits of articles on royals are adjuncts, just like a list of works by an author is an adjunct. There are many articles that successfully manage this tricky process of ending the main text of an article, but then providing appendix-style sections at the end to add such material. It's not easy, but can be done without splitting off to a separate page.
Carcharoth