[WikiEN-l] A war on external links? Was: Inside Higher Ed: Does Wikipedia Suck?

[Charles Matthews]

Carcharoth wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 9:05 AM, Charles Matthews
> <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>   
>> Samuel Klein wrote:
>>     
>>> A feature to improve the curating and presentation of these links
>>> might be handy.  We have a few places were having a  "set of links" as
>>> a first class member of the wikiverse would be useful
>>>  * external links or further reading
>>>  * a list of images related to an article (which may not all fit
>>> neatly in the article)
>>>  * interlanguage and interproject links to a set of articles about the
>>> same topic
>>>
>>>       
>> On the final point, the "poster" style of interwiki link to sister
>> projects begins to look dated, at least to me. It obviously doesn't
>> scale well; or in other words it puts the onus on the project linked to,
>> to organise the material relevant to one WP topic, in such a way that a
>> single link can carry the whole weight. Innovation is at least possible.
>>     
>
> That's an interesting point. I presume you mean wikisource here. For
> Commons and Wikiquote (I'm unsure about the other projects) it is
> fairly easy to have a corresponding page or category or both. If the
> Wikipedia article is a person who is an author, then a wikisource page
> is possible, and if the Wikipedia page is about a book or other
> published work that could be on wikisource, then again a single link,
> page or category is usually possible. But there are some articles
> where this system does fall down. I presume the place to put links to
> editorially selected wikisource pages would be in the external links,
> or as a courtesy link in a citation.
>   
Yes, Wikisource is on my mind in particular, but there are a couple of 
points here. Some work could be done (perhaps I'm not up-to-date, 
though) with stacking those poster boxes more successfully: they are 
more eye-catching than really convenient. There are three kinds of 
template: poster, citation and attribution, and it is really more 
elegant to use the citation links in the external links section, if more 
than one is relevant. The Wikisource category system is not really 
developed enough to do the task right now; its dab system likewise (and 
it is supposed to disambiguate texts, really); and the Wikisource: 
namespace plays a surrogate role for a "topic" namespace (rather than 
being just project pages). But enough of our troubles.

There does seem to be a possibility for a bit of lateral thinking here. 
If, say, the current external links and interwiki sections were done by 
transclusion from something separately maintained (a set of pages 
organised by both language and topic?), how could that be implemented, 
and how could it relate to efforts to make hard-copy bibliography more 
modular?

Charles