On Sunday 18 February 2007 01:44:47 Steve Bennett wrote:
On 2/18/07, Daniel Arnold <arnomane(a)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