On Sunday 18 February 2007 01:44:47 Steve Bennett wrote:
On 2/18/07, Daniel Arnold arnomane@gmx.de wrote:
Links from article namespace into other namespaces are EVIL.
So you reject links to categories as well, presumably. And disambiguation links to mediawiki and wikipedia namespaces?
I was waiting for this answer.
A [[Category:Foobar]] link can *easily* be stripped out of the text. In every stage of the artice it is clear that it cannot be embedded into text (just because it is always displayed outside the text) so none will come to the idea making removal of a category hard ([[:category:foobar]] is something different and is evil in articles).
A template does not generate an endless chain of links. A template embedding always comes to an end. And disambiguation is a template (although specially treated by mediawiki).
But a link like [[Wikipedia:foobar]] *never* comes to and end. You can follow the links of the linked page and so on.
This is not an argument against linking from one space to another. If you're worried about downstream content reusers, the easy solution is to use a template like {{selfref}} to indicate that a link is not part of the encyclopaedic content.
I am not interested in inventing yet another meta content template. It is hard enough handling the existing ones (like navigation bars and this is a $foobar stub and foobar-display-problems) already.
There's a huge amount of processing that needs to be done before we could put out a top quality Wikipedia DVD. Stripping out cross-namespace links is the least of our worries.
Cross namespace links are one problem but surely not the only one. I know what I am talking about as I have done such work myself and did produce a real world result. See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiReader/Sonnensystem. Also cross wiki links in articles about Wikipedia itself are a common problem. They should be done as usual weblinks also in order to reflect distance to oneself.
So BURN all portal links in article namespace NOW. Portals are useful but not everyhwere.
Um, as pointed out, currently there aren't any. Or are you talking about fr and other languages?
I have seen such links in any larger Wikipedia edition language be it in en, de or fr.
Anyways this is off-topic on this list...
Arnomane