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

[David Richfield]

>> 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.

As Kevin said, this is in no way a failure rate.  An external link
provided as a formatted inline citation to support or expand on the
text of the article is very helpful to the reader.  A huge list of
external links at the end of the article is just "here's a bunch of
stuff you might like to read".  It's unlikely to be well used or
maintained, and quickly becomes a magnet for spam.

>> 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.

So maybe what you actually demonstrated is that dumping a site onto
"external references" is much less useful to readers or other editors
than finding a place in the text where it would actually be relevant
and typing <ref>[http://www.example.com/index.html The editing
community is alive and well - Example.com]</ref>

-- 
David Richfield
e^(πi)+1=0