[WikiEN-l] [[Geographic_references]]

[Bryan Derksen]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> I'm not sure if this is the same one, but I saw something very similar
> to that recently. It appears to arise from a conflict between two
> ideas:
> 1) Link to some information to explain how to interpret the
> information in the infobox
> 2) Don't link to wikipedia: space, because that would be a self-reference.
> 
> IMHO, the second principle is a bad one. There seems nothing wrong to
> me with linking to some actual useful information *about the infobox*,
> rather than a contrived non-encyclopaedic article in the main article
> space.

I'm the opposite, I think the second principle is very important.
Anything that's not in the article namespace, template namespace or
image namespace is stuff that's not really a part of the encyclopedia
itself - it's just temporary scaffolding and support equipment we're
using while writing it. When Wikipedia gets mirrored or otherwise
distributed all that non-encyclopedia stuff should be pared away. If
there are links to it then those links will automatically become broken.

Far better to switch over to the <ref></ref><references/> system, IMO.
The main problem here is that there are tens of thousands of articles to
convert. I don't suppose there are any bothandlers who'd be willing to
look into doing automated conversion? Rambot articles are probably still
fairly standardized in format. I've noticed that the old Rambot
reference links use section numbers that no longer match anything in the
reference "article", that could perhaps be repaired in the process.

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