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

[Charles Matthews]

Michael Peel wrote:
>> 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.
Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of the undivided editing box and 
simplicity. I'm not also not really cut out to be a strategy wonk - too 
much to do right now, at least. But the "second decade" of WP is only 
around nine months off, and I hear various ideas circulating. Some of 
what is "up in the air" may be the future.

If I start thinking about the data structure that would support a bot 
putting in language interwiki links, it seems that (although it might be 
a bit untidy in practical terms) it is close to being something with 
interesting potential. If it wasn't private to a bot, but a WMF project 
in itself: wouldn't it provide a focus for all sorts of metadata 
collection, as well as collection of a web directory (Wikipedia doesn't 
do that, but it could happen elsewhere), bibliographical data, no doubt 
other things? Magnus Manske talks to me about such things every time we 
meet. We have got close to a standard "footer" organisation for WP pages 
(such as Works/See also/References/Further reading/External 
links/Attribution/Categories/Interwiki). It would take a bit of thinking 
of matters the other way round, but having other "views" possible in 
which the main body of the article was presented with a footer according 
to some preference options, only References being standard, sounds 
fairly interesting to me.

This thread started really because WP:EL seems now to want external 
links to be minimal, driving people to place relevant links in 
References (for which they'd have to develop the article to justify the 
link). I understand where that kind of thinking comes from, but all 
stick and no carrot makes Jack a dull boy. Hence my interest in other 
options.

Charles