Hey!
The syntax "[[Schnee]]<nowiki />reichtum" is quite common in the German community. There are not many other ways to achieve the same: <span /> or ­ can be used instead.[1] The later is often the better alternative, but an auto-replacement is not possible. For example, "[[Bund]]<nowiki />estag" must become "[[Bund]]es­tag".
Not long ago <b/> was often used. This became a problem with the recent parser updates. All <b/> got replaced with <nowiki />, as far as I'm aware of.
in German, shouldn't they be tweaking the "linktrail" setting on dewiki, instead of using `<nowiki/>`? What are cases where they *do* want the link to include the entire word?
The software feature exists because of English [[word ending]]s. The same exists in German ("viele [[Wiki]]s, viele [[Tisch]]e, viele [[Arbeit]]en"), but is overshadowed by the fact that German is a language with many composites. From my experience, the fact that all linktrails, no matter how long, become part of the link is almost always a problem. It enlarges the click region, which is good, but surprises the reader when he ends at an unexpected article. I guess it would actually be a net-gain when the feature gets turned off or tuned down in German wikis. For example, we could limit the length of the linktrail to 2 characters.
Is somebody interested in creating usage statistics for these linktrails in the German Wikipedia main namespace?
Best Thiemo
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verlinken#Verlinkung_von_Teilw%C3%B6...