Richard Grevers wrote:
I notice that many wikipedians refer to wikipedia pages in these discussion groups using wiki markup: e.g. [[this_article]]. That's very cute, but highly impractical in terms of actually linking to the article from a mail/news client. I usually have to resort to searching, particularly with meta pages that I'm not familiar with the url syntaxt of. Would it not be much better to paste the full url from the browser in list messages?
Not really. Sometimes using the Wiki markup is simply shorthand for saying "The article named "this article'". It lets us know that reference to an article is intended. Pasting the full URL is a lot of work when you are just trying to send off a quick note. The reader who wants to check the article in question (if it is not a purely hypothetical one) can still copy and paste to the search box on any Wikipedia page, and press "Go".
Eclecticology