On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, Magnus Manske wrote:
I noticed some things on wikipedia that IMHO should be avoided:
I have some advice in turn: this list of (good!) rules should go on [[rules to consider]] (which itself should now live at [[wikipedia:rules to consider]] if it doesn't already).
- Creating half a dozen redirects to a single topic. A recent example
of this might be the "ArXiv.org e-print archive", for which "Xxx.lanl.gov", "Www.arXiv.org", "ArXiv.org", and "ArXiv" redirects were created. There's no need to do this if the redirected titles aren't very common and mentioned in the article text anyway. The search function will find them without the redirect, and noone will go through the "All Pages" list if there's a search function.
Sounds OK, but really, what harm does it do if someone does this?
- Links to the talk page of an article appended to the article. Having
"Talk" links in the article text is obsolete, as at least one link to the talk page will show anyway (or two, if you use the sidebar). When editing articles, if you see these links, please delete them.
I'd agree fully with this given that people are completely aware of the Talk namespace and how to get to it.
- Ebooks and other long texts. With the coming software update, the
sidebar will contain a link to "Long Pages" (like an inverse stub list). Please have a look at this once it is available, and remove yet another copy of "The Origin Of Species" (that's not what wikipedia is for, right?), and try to break apart long "real" articles into pieces that are more easy to swallow;)
I now agree with this. If you had asked about nine months ago, I wouldn't be so sure.
Larry