2008/10/12 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>om>:
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(a)dunelm.org.uk