[WikiEN-l] Delinking years and only making links relevant to the context considered harmful

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 6:42 AM, nsk <nsk at karastathis.org> wrote:
> I read Wikipedia a lot and I always enjoy clicking on date/year links,
> or using popups on them, because I am interested to place the
> information I read within a historical context, which is rarely provided
> by the article text.
[snip]
> However, delinking dates and years, or only allowing links directly
> relevant to the context,

If you want almost everything linked then you want something that
could be accomplished by machine.  Better to run some userscript that
autolinks dates/etc than to fill the article with low value links: The
machine linking can do it with perfect consistency and does not
require per-article effort to maintain, while the manual linking
allows the identification of the significant, a task the machine is
ill suited for, and preserves the ability for people who do not care
for everything being linked to still browse with the most significant
links provided.