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

[Andrew Gray]

2008/10/12 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:

> My complaint is not so much that I am
> pro-linking-the-generic-to-the-specific, so much as I am *against*
> linking to a generic thing when the sentence has me thinking of a
> specific thing.  I find it upsetting, frustrating, and confusing. I
> alone am not a statical study, but I've heard from others with the
> same complaint.

The form of this that always gets me is linking to a single word in a
"proper noun phrase" - a set of words that might reasonably be the
title of something.

"...at [[Cambridge]] University..."

"...the 17th [[cavalry]] regiment..."

"...[[John Smith]], a Member of [[Parliament]]..."

(exaggerated examples to make it clear)

I'm never entirely clear why these partial-links get made; perhaps to
avoid a redlink at the time of creation, or perhaps because it isn't
realised that the phrase is a single unit.

> Although this might
> cause some twisty wording in cases where the specific name of
> something had to be needlessly repeated just for the purpose of
> anchoring a link.

Isn't this the same problem we sometimes get in the first sentence of
an article, where we try to avoid linking title words?

"The '''1972 Ruritanian federal election''' was a [[Federal elections
in Ruritania|federal election]] held in 1972 in [[Ruritania]].

I'm not sure if we ever found an elegant way of getting around that
sort of problem.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk