In message 1096261098.9992.59.camel@bad, Evan Prodromou evan-zOntnoXveK8sA/PxXw9srA@public.gmane.org writes
On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 09:35 +0530, shantanu oak wrote:
Hi, What are the implied rules of creating hyperlinks?
Let's assume I am reading the page....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MandrakeSoft
I have understood 2 things about links...
- Red links don't contain any text.
- External links are marked (a convention, I wish all websites
should follow)
But I completely fail to understand why certain words are hyperlinked. For e.g. in the following para why does the date January 27 is linked? I clicked on that date and could not find anything related to the current page i.e. MandrakeSoft.
MandrakeSoft operated under bankruptcy protection from [[January 27]], [[2003]] to [[March 30]], [[2004]]. Despite its efforts to cut losses and improve profits, MandrakeSoft was forced to file for protection due to a series of quarterly losses.
Too much (and mostly unnecessary) hyperlinks makes me shy away from using wiki.
Hmm. We're kind of in a double bind, here. If we don't fix up everything in the encyclopedia to be completely perfect, you're not going to participate. But if we fix everything to be completely perfect, we don't really need your participation after that. B-)
On a more serious note: you should probably look over the manual of style for English Wikipedia. If I'm not mistaken, linking dates and years just because is not recommended. You can help Wikipedia by taking out the links in the page you found.
On the contrary -- linking dates is strongly encouraged, so that they are displayed according to the readers' preferences. [[27 September]] [[2004]] will display variously as 27 September 2004, September 27, 2004, or 2004-09-27. It saves a great many edit wars that way. Anything which will pour oil on the troubled waters of Transatlantic writing styles is a good thing.