[Wikipedia-l] Some thoughts

[Larry Sanger]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, Magnus Manske wrote:

> I noticed some things on wikipedia that IMHO should be avoided:

I have some advice in turn: this list of (good!) rules should go on
[[rules to consider]] (which itself should now live at [[wikipedia:rules
to consider]] if it doesn't already).

> * Creating half a dozen redirects to a single topic. A recent example
> of this might be the "ArXiv.org e-print archive", for which
> "Xxx.lanl.gov", "Www.arXiv.org", "ArXiv.org", and "ArXiv" redirects
> were created. There's no need to do this if the redirected titles
> aren't very common and mentioned in the article text anyway. The
> search function will find them without the redirect, and noone will go
> through the "All Pages" list if there's a search function.

Sounds OK, but really, what harm does it do if someone does this?

> * Links to the talk page of an article appended to the article. Having
> "Talk" links in the article text is obsolete, as at least one link to the
> talk page will show anyway (or two, if you use the sidebar). When editing
> articles, if you see these links, please delete them.

I'd agree fully with this given that people are completely aware of the
Talk namespace and how to get to it.

> * Ebooks and other long texts. With the coming software update, the
> sidebar will contain a link to "Long Pages" (like an inverse stub
> list). Please have a look at this once it is available, and remove yet
> another copy of "The Origin Of Species" (that's not what wikipedia is
> for, right?), and try to break apart long "real" articles into pieces
> that are more easy to swallow;)

I now agree with this.  If you had asked about nine months ago, I wouldn't
be so sure.

Larry