[WikiEN-l] Why are URLs numbered?

[FT2]

The fastest way to educate people that plain, undescribed
"[http://link.com/page]" links are deprecated in mainspace is probably to
rapidly change their existence or rendering.

When people see fewer and fewer of one thing, and more and more of the
replacement, that's about the fastest way to educate people that exists :)

Either a bot (as someone suggested) or a rendering engine change, would
work. Both have pros and cons, but (significantly) both will run immediately
the code is completed.


FT2.


-----Original Message-----
On Behalf Of RLS
Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2007 9:22 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Why are URLs numbered?

On 9/5/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> There really are two separate issues.  That the numbering schemes
> clash is one valid issue.  That the English Wikipedia has deprecated
> the use of these types of links is another.
>

The numbering scheme for URLs without labels definitely needs to change.  A
less-than-clueful reader may be confused when there's a properly cited <ref>
#1, and later on in the article an unlabelled URL, also numbered [1].  If
they clicked on the reference footnote, then they may not subsequently hover
on or click the URL with the same number; or, if they didn't click the
reference footnote, they may click the URL and believe that the URL was
being used to source both the first and second statements.

A useful change as far as unlabeled URLs goes would be to either eliminate
the numbers in mainspace, perhaps replacing them with a globe icon a la
MoinMoin-powered wikis; or to number them in sequence with <ref> tags,
although if we were to do that, we may as well convert them to
<ref>URL</ref> instead.

A more useful change, though I'm unsure about how to implement it, would be
to more thoroughly educate contributors that the [url] format is indeed
deprecated for use as a citation format.

--Darkwind