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

[Rowan Collins]

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 00:58:18 -0400, Evan Prodromou <evan at bad.dynu.ca> wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 09:35 +0530, shantanu oak wrote:
> > Hi,
...
> > 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.
...
> 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.

Actually, I thought linking dates *was* encouraged - for the
(admittedly rather opaque) reason that this triggered special code to
reformat them:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing says "Use links for dates,
so everyone can set their own display order. Use Special:Preferences
to change your own date display setting."

Basically, putting links round "[[January 27]],
[[2003]]" makes it appear as though it was "[[27 January]] [[2003]]"
or even "[[2003]] [[01-27]]" depending how the viewer's preferences
are set. Nifty, but perhaps a bit too magic...

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]