[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Hyperlink convention

[Evan Prodromou]

On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 09:35 +0530, shantanu oak wrote:
> Hi,
> What are the implied rules of creating hyperlinks?
> 
> Let's assume I am reading the page....
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MandrakeSoft
> 
> I have understood 2 things about links...
> 1) Red links don't contain any text.
> 2) External links are marked (a convention, I wish all websites should follow)
> 
> But I completely fail to understand why certain words are hyperlinked.
> For e.g. in the following para why does the date January 27 is linked?
> I clicked on that date and could not find anything related to the
> current page i.e. MandrakeSoft.
> 
> MandrakeSoft operated under bankruptcy protection from [[January 27]],
> [[2003]] to [[March 30]], [[2004]]. Despite its efforts to cut losses
> and improve profits, MandrakeSoft was forced to file for protection
> due to a series of quarterly losses.
> 
> Too much (and mostly unnecessary) hyperlinks makes me shy away from using wiki.

Hmm. We're kind of in a double bind, here. If we don't fix up everything
in the encyclopedia to be completely perfect, you're not going to
participate. But if we fix everything to be completely perfect, we don't
really need your participation after that. B-)

On a more serious note: you should probably look over the manual of
style for English Wikipedia. If I'm not mistaken, linking dates and
years just because is not recommended. You can help Wikipedia by taking
out the links in the page you found.

You will probably find about 100,000,000 thing in Wikipedia as you go
along that will disgust and horrify you. Some you will grow to love;
others you should try to change. There's no Big Boss who's going to do
it for you; if you've got ideas as to how to make the encyclopedia
better, start implementing them (but stop if someone complains!).

~ESP

P.S. I redirected this to wikipedia-l as it's not really a technical
question.