[Foundation-l] Talk pages Considered Harmful (for references)

[Gwern Branwen]

2011/12/22 David Richfield <davidrichfield at gmail.com>:
> This article starts as a complaint about external links being moved to
> talk pages and never making it back to the main page, and then becomes
> a rant against deletionism.

No, it does not 'start' as that; the complaint is a subsection and
case-study into one deletionist practice (deleting external links).
Feel free to ignore the 'rant' part and deal with the observed facts.

> About external links, the real question is: what is a good number of
> links to have at the end of an article?  Everyone will surely agree
> that an article with 100 external links at the end is not ideal.  What
> people want from Wikipedia is a site where others have sifted through
> the chaff to present the most relevant information.

I would not agree. On an extremely complex topic, perhaps 100 links is
perfectly justifiable. Figure 5 sub-divisions, that's only 20 links a
piece. (No one looks at an article with 5 sections with 20 references
a piece and goes 'everyone will surely agree this is not ideal!')
Context is king, and you are immediately trying to make dangerous
generalizations.

So tell me, what failure rate would you find acceptable? You
apparently are not disturbed at a >90% failure rate to use external
links; would you be disturbed at 95%? At 99%? Before trying to put me
onto a slippery slope, explain where on the original topic you would
finally agree, 'yes, this is too bad a failure rate, something must be
done'. Until you present some principled reason or specifics, you read
like a blind defense of the status quo.

> What article
> needs more than about 5 to 10 external links to cover the issues that
> haven't been addressed in the inline citations and the text?

Any article where the editors are largely absent and will not use even
gift-wrapped excerpted references; as is the case for >400 articles
with hundreds of thousands/millions of readers, which I just spent a
great deal of time demonstrating.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net