[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

[Austin Hair]

> I would support something along the line of interwiki links in the 
> header, but to wiktionary, for article titles that are also words with 
> definitions.  I don't think we should liberally spread through links to 
> Wiktionary in running text though.  In the worst case that would result 
> in every single word in Wikipedia being hyperlinked to its definition, 
> which would be a bit strange.  Even if only "unusual" words were 
> hyperlinked, it'd have a negative stylistic effect in highlighting the 
> "big words".  It'd also have a subtle hint of "this is a word you might 
> not know", and given the wide variation in vocabularies it'd be hard to 
> come up with some reasonable set of such words---much better is to 
> assume everyone knows all words, and let them use a dictionary (such as 
> Wiktionary, or some other online dictionary, or one of their desk) on 
> their own if they don't.

I agree.  Wikipedia is not everything2, and I'd prefer to keep
wikilinking analogous to the use of small caps in print encyclopedias
(that is, as a pointer to an article of interest in the same topic).

I like being able to look up words conveniently, but that's a feature
I'd rather have in my desktop environment.  (In my case, this means
highlighting a word and hitting command-=)  Cluttering a page up with
hyperlinks would be confusing at best and counterproductive at worst,
even if Wiktionary links are stylistically differentiated (with a
different color, perhaps).

> -Mark

-- 
A. D. Hair <austin at austinhair.org>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
http://www.austinhair.org/
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