There should be an acronym sweep done of wikipedia. E.g, right at the start of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSCM we are hit with ELINT, SIGINT and ECM. More acronyms that an offline reader has no way of figuring out. Don't depend that we can click, or even mouseover, e.g., on our PDA offline.
Sweep for any (perl regexp) m@http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%5BA-Z%5D+@ links that don't have an "(Explanation ...)" following in the text. Or better yet make sure they are all spelled out right in the file name.
P.S., in your articles that are "(Redirected from bla bla)", use real HTTP redirects or something, anything to not have the same hundreds of kilobytes end up on the user's disk but just in a different filename. Indeed, he now has to remember that he has already read the article and cannot depend on link colors alone etc.
P.S., Looking at e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability in e.g., lynx or plucker, there seems to be ads for political parties festooned across the top. Only in firefox does one see they are inoffensively at the side. Perhaps move them to the bottom.
P.S., the "personal appeal for donations" line looks small in firefox, but big in text browsers... also it is in the critical search engine indexing top of page area... I bet it might be all one sees in some search engines page preview snippet... Perhaps move to bottom.
Sending to wikien-l, the only place I ever got a reply.
On 2/7/06, Dan Jacobson jidanni@jidanni.org wrote:
There should be an acronym sweep done of wikipedia. E.g, right at the start of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSCM we are hit with ELINT, SIGINT and ECM. More acronyms that an offline reader has no way of figuring out. Don't depend that we can click, or even mouseover, e.g., on our PDA offline.
I think that's covered in the style guidelines somewhere. You're totally right. In that particular case I'm not sure why the article name is not the full name, and the abbreviation not just given as an alternative name.
Sweep for any (perl regexp) m@http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%5BA-Z%5D+@ links that don't have an "(Explanation ...)" following in the text. Or better yet make sure they are all spelled out right in the file name.
Sure, propose a bot.
P.S., in your articles that are "(Redirected from bla bla)", use real HTTP redirects or something, anything to not have the same hundreds of kilobytes end up on the user's disk but just in a different filename. Indeed, he now has to remember that he has already read the article and cannot depend on link colors alone etc.
Ideally, no links in Wikipedia should ever point to redirects. If you find one, please feel free to fix it. There are some semi-automatic bots to do this.
Redirects are, I believe, primarily intended for people to be able to type in FireFox and get redirected to Firefox or whatever. You're probably suggesting a lot of work for not much benefit.
P.S., Looking at e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability in e.g., lynx or plucker, there seems to be ads for political parties festooned across the top. Only in firefox does one see they are inoffensively at the side. Perhaps move them to the bottom.
Mmm, bug reports that sound like "This page looks bad in Lynx" always go down well :) Best of luck to you with this one.
P.S., the "personal appeal for donations" line looks small in firefox, but big in text browsers... also it is in the critical search engine indexing top of page area... I bet it might be all one sees in some search engines page preview snippet... Perhaps move to bottom.
No argument here.
Steve
"Steve Bennett" wrote
Ideally, no links in Wikipedia should ever point to redirects.
I hope this is an 'urban myth' kind of thing. There are plenty of reasons to use 'Lord Byron', rather than George Gordon, 6th Earl of Byron, or whatever he is. Don't even get me started on [[Montesquiou]]. Piped links are there to serve man, not the other way round.
And another thing. Suppose pages get subdivided, quite reasonably, in a process of natural growth. (We may have started with [[Sonny and Cher]] and redirected [[Sonny Bono]] to it then, but now Sonny, Cher, Sonny&Cher are to be three pages.) Then you may hope that Sonny Bono, which was a redirect, but now is going to be a page on its own, has not been changed to Sonny&Cher in all sorts of piped link by officious people.
Charles
On 2/8/06, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
I hope this is an 'urban myth' kind of thing. There are plenty of reasons to use 'Lord Byron', rather than George Gordon, 6th Earl of Byron, or whatever he is. Don't even get me started on [[Montesquiou]]. Piped links are there to serve man, not the other way round.
You're probably right, but what reasons specifically?
And another thing. Suppose pages get subdivided, quite reasonably, in a process of natural growth. (We may have started with [[Sonny and Cher]] and redirected [[Sonny Bono]] to it then, but now Sonny, Cher, Sonny&Cher are to be three pages.) Then you may hope that Sonny Bono, which was a redirect, but now is going to be a page on its own, has not been changed to Sonny&Cher in all sorts of piped link by officious people.
Ah, that's quite a good example. Probably in many cases the link could originally point to [Sonny and Cher#Sonny Bono] or something.
I was thinking of cases like differences in American/British terminology (lift/elevator, cock (chicken)/rooster) etc, where it makes no sense to retain links to the redirect. Examples where the link points to some specific aspect of a more general topic are a reasonable exception I suppose.
Steve
"Steve Bennett" wrote
Examples where the
link points to some specific aspect of a more general topic are a reasonable exception I suppose.
I really can't agree. There are so many exceptions.
For example, this morning I was linking instances of [[livability]], which I had made a redirect to [[quality of life]]. It would have been about the same effort to paste [[quality of life|livability]] in each case. But suppose tomorrow someone second-guesses me, says that 'livability' doesn't really mean close enough to 'quality of life', it's about amenities or something. If I _had_ piped each link there would be the whole backlink list of [[quality of life]] to look through, rather than a perfectly simple case of unpick the redirect, start a fresh page.
These tidy-minded things often have little to do with the real issues in writing a dynamic 'Pedia.
Charles
On 2/8/06, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
These tidy-minded things often have little to do with the real issues in writing a dynamic 'Pedia.
The primary reason I try and avoid links to redirects is avoiding double-redirects if the page changes names one day. A 'softwear' issue I suppose. Or should we just leave double-redirects to a bot to fix, if and when it feels like it?
Steve
On 2/8/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
The primary reason I try and avoid links to redirects is avoiding double-redirects if the page changes names one day. A 'softwear' issue I suppose. Or should we just leave double-redirects to a bot to fix, if and when it feels like it?
Double redirects should be fixed by anyone who performs a move. If they fail to do that, bots can easily clean up.
-Matt
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 2/8/06, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
These tidy-minded things often have little to do with the real issues in writing a dynamic 'Pedia.
The primary reason I try and avoid links to redirects is avoiding double-redirects if the page changes names one day. A 'softwear' issue I suppose. Or should we just leave double-redirects to a bot to fix, if and when it feels like it?
What the hell? You fix the double redirects when you move the page. The message says it in bold. "Links to the old page title will not be changed; be sure to check for double-redirects (using "What links here") after the move."
On 2/8/06, SPUI drspui@gmail.com wrote:
What the hell? You fix the double redirects when you move the page. The message says it in bold. "Links to the old page title will not be changed; be sure to check for double-redirects (using "What links here") after the move."
Fair enough :) Don't worry, I haven't been rampantly going around "fixing" links to redirects. If there are bots that fix up in these cases, so much the better.
As for the mover of a page being expected to do it...well...I recently moved "cock (chicken)" to "rooster" and set out to fix the 10 or so double redirects. But my god what a tedious, painful process. I got through about 5 and said to hell with it. We really should do completely away with all menial labour of this kind...
Steve
On 2/8/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/8/06, SPUI drspui@gmail.com wrote:
What the hell? You fix the double redirects when you move the page. The message says it in bold. "Links to the old page title will not be changed; be sure to check for double-redirects (using "What links here") after the move."
Fair enough :) Don't worry, I haven't been rampantly going around "fixing" links to redirects. If there are bots that fix up in these cases, so much the better.
As for the mover of a page being expected to do it...well...I recently moved "cock (chicken)" to "rooster" and set out to fix the 10 or so double redirects. But my god what a tedious, painful process. I got through about 5 and said to hell with it. We really should do completely away with all menial labour of this kind...
Steve
This is always the WP:AWB. It's a great tool for mundane things like this, especially since you can do some, leave it, and then fire it up again to finish the rest.
Ian
Steve Bennett wrote:
As for the mover of a page being expected to do it...well...I recently moved "cock (chicken)" to "rooster" and set out to fix the 10 or so double redirects. But my god what a tedious, painful process. I got through about 5 and said to hell with it. We really should do completely away with all menial labour of this kind...
How is it tedious and painful? You look at the "what links here" list, search the page for (redirect), and edit all of 10 pages.
Steve Bennett wrote:
As for the mover of a page being expected to do it...well...I recently moved "cock (chicken)" to "rooster" and set out to fix the 10 or so double redirects. But my god what a tedious, painful process. I got through about 5 and said to hell with it. We really should do completely away with all menial labour of this kind...
I suspect the prospect of manual labor has the beneficial side effect of discouraging moving articles around, otherwise some would be getting moved to new names every day.
Stan