[WikiEN-l] Dab page notice

[Charles Matthews]

quiddity wrote

> The thing is, we can't guess or know what a reader might be looking
> for, so we try to aid them /based on the title they arrived at/.

Well, actually the problem here seems to be that you have an idea about _how_ they will navigate and find something, and you are imposing it. And in fact you can't guess how navigational pages will be used, either.
 
> *If they arrived at the page [[Boll]], they were probably looking for
> something called "Boll".
> *If they were looking for the thing discovered by a guy named Boll, or
> for the nationality of a specific guy named Boll, then they can find
> that via his article.
> 
> or
> 
> *If someone wanted to find the article on "Calhoun County", but the
> only thing they could remember about the place was it contained a city
> named "Springfield", then they'll have to make an extra click to go
> along with their extra mental jump.
> 
> 
> So, Calhoun County and rhodopsin should not be wikilinked at those 2
> dab pages (According to our current guideline). This is with the
> intention of making the dab pages efficacious to use for the majority
> of readers (in all their diverse forms).

I think you completely missed the point of those examples. 

And you miss a major point about being a wiki, which is that hyperlinking is made easy for a reason. It is not "efficacious" to have rules about linking like this. It is overly prescriptive.

The issue is fairly simple, I think, and has little to do with hypotheses about how pages could, should or would be used. About 90% of the time, anyway, excess bluelinks on a line in a dab page make it somewhat harder to read. So overlinking of that kind should be discouraged, and I quite agree with that. Making it a hard-and-fast rule, and not a guideline, is a bad idea.

It will probably not be long before someone decides a bot is needed to "enforce" this guideline, and purge links that are useful. Which would be ridiculous, in my view.

Charles


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