Karl Eichwalder wrote:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
Sounds cool. But why not just make another article?
Because we write for readers. Some subjects are more complex and it is a real pain if you as a reader are forced to download a bunch of articles to get the idea of the subject in question.
[[X]] should still have enough about Y that you can understand what you need of Y to get an idea of X. That doesn't mean that more detailed information on Y can't or shouldn't go in a separate article -- if people are tyring to link to [[X#Y]], then that's probable.
Also people will start adding stuff to article which are "not complete" (they will not lookup other articles first); thus duplicating of info usually happens and in the end the article is long again.
But isn't this a /good/ thing??? We /want/ them to write more about the subtopic, and once that page becomes very long, then we can split it up too. True, duplication is bad, but that's not likely if the title is good.
Let me give a rough example:
We begin by writing an article on topic [[X]]. It starts small, but as it grows, it expands to look like this:
"= X = " "In [[context]], X is '''definition'''. " "Introductory paragraph. " "== Y1 == " "Stuff about Y1 in the context of X. " "== Y2 == " "Stuff about Y2 in the context of X. " "== Y3 == " "Stuff about Y3 in the context of X.
Then it gets kind of long, so we split, say, Y2 into its own article, which might be [[Y]] or might need a longer name like [[Y2 in X]], depending on the specific situation. Let's suppose just [[Y2]]. Then [[Y2]] looks like this:
"= Y2 = " "In [[X]], Y2 is '''definition'''. " "Much the same as the earlier paragraph about Y2.
That's a whole paragraph, so it's not too short. Meanwhile, [[X]] is edited to look like this:
"= X = " "In [[context]], X is '''definition'''. " "Introductory paragraph. " "== Y1 == " "Stuff about Y1 in the context of X. " "== Y2 == " "Somewhat less about [[Y2]] than before. "For more information, see [[Y2]]. " "== Y3 == " "Stuff about Y3 in the context of X.
Now there is no point in linking to [[X#Y2]]; you /want/ to link to [[Y2]]. Meanwhile, people start writing more about Y2 in [[Y2]]. They wouldn't have written this in [[X]], since it may be too much detail to write about in an article on X generally. But it's right at home in [[Y2]], and it doesn't duplicate stuff in [[X]], because reading [[X]] makes it clear that detail about Y2 is in [[Y2]].
Several good examples of this can be found all at once among the country articles on [[en:]].
This leads to the conclusion that fragment identifiers are a good thing.
The only way that I'd really want to use them here is to have [[Y2]] redirect to [[X#Y2]] for a while. Now that I think about it, that might be /very/ useful.
It's becoming clear to me that we're going to have to continue to allow [[X#Y2]], since so many people want it; and there are wikis (like Wiktionary and probably [[pl:]]) whose users plan to employ it pretty freely. I /would/ like people to think long and hard about how it can be used properly, however; and I know that we'll have to have some discussions on <wikiEN-L> about how we all want to use them best on [[en:]]. But other wikis can have other policies, even ones that I rather disagree with, without destroying the world. ^_^
-- Toby