[Wikipedia-l] Modest proposals

[Uri Yanover]

> (4) When we think about policy options, it often helps to consider
> carefully what problem we're trying to solve, and to make sure that our
> solution is the most elegant solution to that problem.  It is not entirely
> clear to me what the problem is, in this case.  Originally, Uri Yanover
> said:
>
> >The problem is in the following: it is extremely inconvenient
> >(as a policy) to write "[[Middle Earth/Elrond|Elrond]] was
> >the lord of [[Middle Earth/Rivendell|Rivendell]]" than it is
> >to write "[[Elrond]] was the lord of [[Rivendell]]"
>
> This suggests that the problem is *just* one involved in typing long page
> titles in order to create a link, but the solution offered by Uri solves a
> lot more than that, so I'm not sure this is exactly the problem he wants
> to solve.

I used to think so when I'd written that post, but I no longer do.
Having considered the subject for long enough, I reached the
concept of aliases (more details in the mailing list). The general
usefullness of aliases is for disambiguating (that is, making [[root]]
point at [[root (mathematics)]] on pages concerning with algebra
and at [[root (botanics)]] at pages concerning with plants).

However, the other useful thing that could be done with aliases
is facilitating the editing of pages like [[Middle Earth]], so that
ineed [[Elrond]] on an a page that uses aliases becomes
[[Elrond (Middle Earth)]]. But this use is secondary, and
confined only to pages that describe a specific universe.
The fact that the vast majority of the other articles does not
use subpaging indicates that probably there won't be too much
abuse of aliasing in this way.

What I don't like about Tim's idea is the fact that it converts
the link automatically basing on parsing of the article title.
But not only that would be inconvenient (making it more
difficult to edit the article afterwards and sometimes creating
links that the author doesn't want), it would also be out
of policy, as it would essentially be a substitute for subpages.

Sincerely yours,
            Uri Yanover