At the moment, when one puts the first part of a word between [[square brackets]], the word as a whole will become a link. Although I like that as a general principle, I think it would be good to have an opportunity to escape this, and give a possibility to have only the 'zoo' in [[zoo]]keeper be linking. This would especially be useful in a language like German, where complex terms are often formed by stringing words together into a single word, rather than in a sequence of words as is usual in English.
What are other people's thoughts here? Would it be a good idea? What syntax would be preferred?
Andre Engels
Andre Engels engels@uni-koblenz.de writes:
What are other people's thoughts here? Would it be a good idea? What syntax would be preferred?
[[zoo|zookeeper]]
On 27 Jan 2003, Gareth Owen wrote:
Andre Engels engels@uni-koblenz.de writes:
What are other people's thoughts here? Would it be a good idea? What syntax would be preferred?
[[zoo|zookeeper]]
I don't think that would be a good idea, as it is more or less equal to the existing syntax. It would certainly mean that we'd have to change tons of existing pages, since links like [[cat|cats]] are not rare at all. Also, it has something illogical to have [[cat|cats]] link only 'cat' and [[cat]]s link everything.
Andre Engels
At the moment, when one puts the first part of a word between [[square brackets]], the word as a whole will become a link. Although I like that as a general principle, I think it would be good to have an opportunity to escape this, and give a possibility to have only the 'zoo' in [[zoo]]keeper be linking. This would especially be useful in a language like German, where complex terms are often formed by stringing words together into a single word, rather than in a sequence of words as is usual in English.
As a fellow German, I don't think it's necessary. Half-links (heh!) are irritating because they interrupt the reading flow and force the reader to mentally emphasize part of the word. They also encourage overlinking and lazy linking (the combination of which forms a condition commonly referred to as "Everything2 syndrome"). If you feel an urge to create such links, you're probably doing something wrong -- you should use "See also" instead or change the prose accordingly.
Regards,
Erik
On Mon, 27 Jan 2003, Andre Engels wrote:
At the moment, when one puts the first part of a word between [[square brackets]], the word as a whole will become a link. Although I like that as a general principle, I think it would be good to have an opportunity to escape this, and give a possibility to have only the 'zoo' in [[zoo]]keeper be linking. This would especially be useful in a language like German, where complex terms are often formed by stringing words together into a single word, rather than in a sequence of words as is usual in English.
I think that having a link in only part of a word would look hideously ugly! I noticed yesterday that someone had written "sub[[genre]]" in an article ([[High fantasy]]), and that only part of the word had become a link. I changed it to "[[Genre|subgenre]]". It looks much nicer now. :)
I also think it looks ugly when only *part* of a name, book title, etc. is linked, or when there is a link within a heading. Is that just me...?
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
Oliver Pereira wrote:
I think that having a link in only part of a word would look hideously ugly!
agreed
I also think it looks ugly when only *part* of a name, book title, etc. is linked, or when there is a link within a heading. Is that just me...?
Links in titles are hideous. Links within the bolded first mention of the subject look pretty bad too., eg The '''black [[rat]]''' .....
On Mon, 27 Jan 2003, Andre Engels wrote:
At the moment, when one puts the first part of a word between [[square brackets]], the word as a whole will become a link. Although I like that as a general principle, I think it would be good to have an opportunity to escape this, and give a possibility to have only the 'zoo' in [[zoo]]keeper be linking.
<uglyhackalert> I think it would be ugly as heck, but if you want to you can break up the word with a useless HTML tag like this: [[zoo]]<b></b>keeper </uglyhackalert>
(Shades of SixSingleQuotes on Ward's Wiki...)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org