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

[Michael Peel]

On 2 Apr 2010, at 11:21, Charles Matthews wrote:

> Carcharoth wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 9:05 AM, Charles Matthews
>> <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>>> Samuel Klein wrote:
>>>>  * 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.

I'm really not fond of the poster boxes in their current form at all.  
It's far too easy for them to clutter up a page. As a suggestion,  
what about something like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40-foot_telescope
Look at the infobox. While you're at the page, also look at the  
bottom - that's my preferred way of dealing with external links. ;-)

That doesn't solve the issue of multiple links being needed, but IMO  
it does make the links look a lot better and in a more relevant  
place. I would expect that most multiple links to Wikisource would/ 
should be in the references, though - although the same probably  
wouldn't be true for wikinews links.

> 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.

I think that's just Wikisource's growing pains; over time I think it  
will probably end up with more disambig pages and also topic pages.  
But perhaps that's just my viewpoint as I'm used to Wikipedia.

> 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?

That sounds like a way of adding confusion to those editing a page,  
when they find that part of the page is stored somewhere else  
completely. Interwiki (as in language) links seem to be dealt with  
well nowadays by robots; expanding that to include wikisource links  
might be good. External links are best done as project-specific ones  
IMO, though.

Mike