As Bartosz says, and I think most of the communities
would agree if asked
on their respective village pumps - we value the external link icon in
particular, and most of the other icons in general (with the possible
exception of the https padlock). We think they are useful for both editors
and readers.
Re: Gadget - This isn't a particular workflow - this is:
"I'm reading a random article, and I notice an external link icon, so, as
a wikignome, I either: (if spam) remove it, (if citation) fix it, (if
[subjective decision about its relevance/worth and adherence to [[WP:EL]]
guideline) move it into the External links section."
A gadget would not be a good replacement.
By all means clean up the CSS, but do not consider removing the icons
without seeking much much wider input.
On 13-10-29 11:57 AM, Jared Zimmerman wrote:
Nick, good points, for the particular use case
sounds like a gadget for
showing external links called out for workflows around fixing them would
be a good idea. After hearing everyone's thought i'm leaning toward no
icons for the average user.
*
*
*
*
*Jared Zimmerman *\\Director of User Experience \\Wikimedia Foundation
M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmerman <https://twitter.com/**
JaredZimmerman <https://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman>>
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 11:41 AM, quiddity <pandiculation(a)gmail.com
<mailto:pandiculation@gmail.**com <pandiculation(a)gmail.com>>> wrote:
+1 for more discussion, and onwiki discussion to find out why
we/they've each kept them in the individual CSS payloads for so many
years...
On 10/24/2013 02:48 PM, Jared Zimmerman wrote:
Its definitely a less heavy
handed way of doing
the thing many (annoying) sites do when they warn
you that you're leaving their site. I just wonder
is the signal to noise it worth it. I don't know
that modern web users have any expectations that
link within a site always point to local site urls.
Wikis are special, in relation to most sites, because of the density
of internal links (many per paragraph), and the expectation that
most links are internal and will lead to a similar quality/style of
information. That applies from Wikisource, to Wookiepedia.
In wikis that don't mix external links in the main content (eg most
Wikipedias), the icons are also useful /for editors/ as they can
easily notice that something needs to be moved/fixed.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Help:External_link_icons<https://en.wiki…
a
good list of what the English Wikipedia has.
See also recent discussion at
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.**org/show_bug.cgi?id=54604<https://bugzilla.…
amount of CSS rules for external links")
The only icon that seems (afaik) completely unnecessary, and
bright/distracting, is the https padlock, which possibly
could/should be replaced with the standard external link icon.
(Unless there's a rationale for it that I'm forgetting/unaware of.)
See this 2009 discussion where Davidgothberg created a blue (less
distracting) replacement, if we need to keep a padlock for some
reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**MediaWiki_talk:Common.css/**
Archive_11#Secure_links_**padlock<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWik…
https://www.mediawiki.org/**wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/**60320<https://…
HTH. Quiddity
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