brion vibber wrote:
We have allowed such links since nearly a year ago, but you had to make an anchor yourself by putting in some HTML tag with an 'id="anchorname"' attribute.
Sounds cool. But why not just make another article?
The discussion is whether to automatically _create_ anchors from headers, which is needed for Erik's proposed automatic table of contents generation for pages with more than three headers.
Heavens no! That would be ugly and non-standard and should not be a default setting (in the same way as the almost as ugly auto header numbering is not the default).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Daniel Mayer wrote:
brion vibber wrote:
We have allowed such links since nearly a year ago, but you had to make an anchor yourself by putting in some HTML tag with an 'id="anchorname"' attribute.
Sounds cool. But why not just make another article?
A good question. Opposition to having a standard wiki syntax for creating anchors was and remains driven by opposition to overlong articles, which are difficult to edit and maintain.
Erik has also created a feature whereby you can edit particular subsections of a page more easily, so this may be less of a factor.
Of course, there are plenty of times when we do have long pages, which aren't necessarily articles; among others, the Village Pump and many popular talk pages become HUUUGE as many discussions bump on through. It's sometimes useful to point people to specific elements of discussion. Or, we could be more vigilant about breaking them up -- into subpages. :)
The discussion is whether to automatically _create_ anchors from headers, which is needed for Erik's proposed automatic table of contents generation for pages with more than three headers.
Heavens no! That would be ugly and non-standard and should not be a default setting (in the same way as the almost as ugly auto header numbering is not the default).
Do you not like the anchors (which are invisible), or the table of contents?
I think a tasteful, small, off in the corner table of contents might be nice, though the present one is hideous. :) I don't know what "non-standard" is supposed to mean, but last I checked the W3C recommended including such links (certainly they have table-of-contents links on most of their long specs pages).
A live example might be helpful. I'm having trouble getting at the CVS server right now, but I've copied over my work tree from yesterday, which is more or less up to date, onto test.wikipedia.org.
Note that this does _not_ include the categories & other stuff Magnus is working on that isn't in CVS. Magnus, you'll have to merge those back in; I left the files in a backup directory.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On Tue, 1 Jul 2003 10:51:15 -0700, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com gave utterance to the following:
brion vibber wrote:
We have allowed such links since nearly a year ago, but you had to make an anchor yourself by putting in some HTML tag with an 'id="anchorname"' attribute.
Sounds cool. But why not just make another article?
Because we have (whether you like them or not) articles such as http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation%2C_aerospace_and_aeronautical... which help reduce the number of stub articles and are much easier to follow than the equivalent wiktionary article (just look at the disambiguation article for [[pitch]]. In fact - links to disambign articles are a perfect use. You can make it clear what sense of a word you are linking to.
Richard Grevers wrote:
In fact - links to disambign articles are a perfect use. You can make it clear what sense of a word you are linking to.
Erm ... why would you ever /deliberately/ link to a disambig page like this? Why not just link to the page that that section of the disambig page links to? The purpose of disambig pages is almost entirely to catch links that /don't/ go where they really ought to go.
Perhaps you mean links to articles that have several brief discussions that are separated by horizontal rules? That makes some sense.
-- Toby
On Wed, 2 Jul 2003 16:21:15 -0700, Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu gave utterance to the following:
Richard Grevers wrote:
In fact - links to disambign articles are a perfect use. You can make it clear what sense of a word you are linking to.
Erm ... why would you ever /deliberately/ link to a disambig page like this? Why not just link to the page that that section of the disambig page links to? The purpose of disambig pages is almost entirely to catch links that /don't/ go where they really ought to go.
Perhaps you mean links to articles that have several brief discussions that are separated by horizontal rules? That makes some sense.
Yes - if you look at the page for [[Pitch]] for example, not all contexts link to articles (most have wiki links, but in some cases the target article is very broad and will be lucky to mention the word pitch once.
-- Toby _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Richard Grevers wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Perhaps you mean links to articles that have several brief discussions that are separated by horizontal rules? That makes some sense.
Yes - if you look at the page for [[Pitch]] for example, not all contexts link to articles (most have wiki links, but in some cases the target article is very broad and will be lucky to mention the word pitch once.
OK (I assume that you mean [[en:Pitch]]) ... but the scheme that's being planned now will do nothing for that example. It doesn't even have horizontal rules! (And much of that should move to Wiktionary too.) That's why I said above that it makes only /some/ sense. ^_^
-- Toby
Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com writes:
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 force to download a bunch of articles to get the idea of the subject in question.
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.
This leads to the conclusion that fragment identifiers are a good thing.
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
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