[WikiEN-l] Why are URLs numbered?

[RLS]

On 9/5/07, zetawoof <zetawoof at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> How about only converting links which lack label text, then?
> "[http://url/]" would get turned into an inline reference of the form
> "<ref>http://url</ref>", while a "labeled" link of the form
> "[http://url/ link text]" would still generate an inline link. There
> are some articles where an inline link is actually desired (a link to
> a web site in an article about the site, for example, or pretty much
> anything outside article space) - but they should be labeling their
> links anyways.
>
> What'd be even nicer would be falling back to the original link
> behavior (or some variant thereof) if there's no <references/> tag
> present in the page. I don't have a strong understanding of the
> parser, so I don't know if this would be possible to implement
> cleanly. It seems like the nicest possible solution, though - as talk
> and project pages lack <references/> tags, they fall back to numbered
> links, which is desirable.
>

This seems most reasonable to me. Any other behavior that involves
automatically converting links to references would make noticeboards and
talk pages unwieldy when it comes to things like diff links, etc.  I think I
would go bat-loopy insane in short order if every time I went to help out at
WQA and want to see a diff I had to click to jump the page down to the
references section and then click a second time to open the diff (not to
mention that it would make a page like WQA, which already is often > 200 KB
even longer by creating a references section. There's currently 74
un-labelled links on that page).

--Darkwind