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The section on
Piped links and redirects to sections of articles contains advice on creating links within articles using the format [[Article#Section|name of link]]
, and also says that it is "bad practice" to use the format [[Article#Section]]
instead of a separate redirect since it can interfere with navigation. Any thoughts on resolving this apparent conflict? —
Coconutporkpie (
talk)
09:23, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
[[Article#Section]]
links may still be confusing. As of
14 September 2016, that part read: Usually, a redirect page from a sub-topic to a general topic already exists, or should be created on demand. It is bad practice to make such links as Article#Section links explicitly, because navigation becomes inconvenient after the section is replaced by a summary of a new article. Instead, link through redirects, as it costs little and makes improvements easier.
[[Article#Section]]
links – piped links such as [[Article#Section|name of link]]
would still have this problem. The question is, which method – use of the pipe or a redirect – is preferred? —
Coconutporkpie (
talk)
15:20, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
[[Article#Section|name of link]]
renders as
name of link, and [[Article#Section]]
renders as
Article#Section. The hash sign in the second one is a straight "not nice to see"; not only does it not read well, the reader may not know what it means - worse, they may associate it with some facebooky thing, as in "click here to trend this!". --
Redrose64 (
talk)
20:51, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
If an existing article has a section specifically about the topic, you can redirect or link directly to it, by following the article name with a number sign (
#
) and the name of the section. For example [...] the link eight gluon types (typed as[[Gluon#Eight gluon colors|eight gluon types]]
) links to a specific section in the article Gluon.
The advantage of redirects over piped links is that they allow us to determine which pages link to the given topic using Special:WhatLinksHere, which in turn allows us to: Create a new article when a significant number of links to that topic exist (see WP:Don't fix links to redirects that are not broken and Redirects with possibilities); [and] Maintain links (e.g. by filtering incoming links and identifying related articles).
Why is this article a redirect for WP:EGG? "EGG" looks like an acronym. I don't see this on the page. Skepticalgiraffe ( talk) 16:27, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
Perhaps we should state unequivocally that linking numbers of any kind is not desirable. I have seen an editor repeatedly trying to link the numbers in financial figures, and WP:OVERLINK seems inadequate to use as it's not currently worded to explain why we don't link numbers. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 15:04, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
OK, let's take this from another tack. If someone is linking a number in a financial figure, what guideline should I rely upon when reverting? Currently, all I can do is appeal to common sense as far as I can tell. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 21:14, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
We have the following:
The simplest way to prevent this breakage is to add an {{ anchor}} template just above the section title, listing the section title, and (optionally) any obsolete titles or alternative titles. This method is easy to understand, reliable, and straightforward to maintain and update. For example:
{{anchor|Section name}}
{{anchor|Section name|Old name|Alternative name|Other name etc.}}
==Section name==
It is good practice to place an anchor whenever the section is expected to be the target of an incoming wikilink, either from elsewhere in the same article or from anywhere else outside the article.
The problem here is that if an anchor name is the same as a section heading, the result is two different HTML elements that have the same id
, which is forbidden - id
s must be unique within a given document. See HTML5 - A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML - W3C Recommendation 28 October 2014, section
3.2.5.1 The id
attribute. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk)
00:35, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
{{anchor|Section name}}
@ Redrose64, TheDJ, and Izno: I was the one that tweaked the advice. I did so because if one were to anchor directly below a section, they would have to scroll up to see the section title. For the record, I have done a lot of work trying to anchor presidencies and premierships of US presidents and British prime ministers respectively, and I wouldn't have changed the text had I not been reverted at John Quincy Adams. I would prefer having the anchor directly within the section title markup, and I am dissatisfied with having to place the anchors directly above the section markup (since this adds a bit of whitespace directly above said header) but given a choice I would want readers to view the title of the section, that they have been redirected to. It doesn't really make sense otherwise.-- Nevé – selbert 18:15, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
I was just reading MOS:NOPIPE and decided to write here about something I have been wondering about for a while. It seems to me that there are two kinds of links. Some link to an article that specifically describes the term in question. Others to the more general category, or general meaning of the term in question. While looking for an example, I found one on WP:MOS itself. There is a link knowledge tree which does not link to an article at all about knowledge tree but instead to tree structure. Certainly that is often fine, and often what is needed, but sometimes not what I expect. The actual question here, is if it would be possible to have a different color for the two kinds of links. That would depend on editors knowing which kind they wanted, and a way to indicate it. Has anyone else noticed this, or now that I mention it, see the reason to mention it? Thanks all. Gah4 ( talk) 14:54, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
I have just been removing some overlinking from the lede of the Charles Darwin article but have come across some links which, although they comply with the manual of style, don't add to the understanding of the article. By its nature, an article like this uses a lot of scientific terms which means that there are quite a few links required in the lede but I can't see that linking to sub articles of that article is desirable or useful when they are discussed at length in the article and linked there. As an example, if I came accross the link His five-year voyage why would I want to follow the link at that point when the second voyage is something that is discussed at length in the article and is linked at the top of that section? Could we say something about this in the guidlines? Richerman (talk) 10:45, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
I do agree that overlinking is a problem, but often enough lately, I have had a hard time finding a link after first seeing it. This gets worse as articles get bigger. Would it be possible to put a link index at the bottom of the page? That is, an alphabetical list of all links in an article? (Maybe only for larger articles.) This would reduce the tendency to overlink, as one would know where to find needed links. I presume this will need a lot of discussion before it happens, though. Gah4 ( talk) 20:58, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
In articles where different readers likely are interested in different sections, shouldn't links appear in more than one section? For example, in the nicotine page, the word "snus" appears in the Recreation and the Adverse Effects section. Readers going directly to the Adverse Effects section will not be presented a link. Zvi Zig ( talk • contribs 19:00, 24 November 2016 (UTC)
Early in the history of Wikipedia (before 2006 or so), a practice arose of "linking everything that moves" just because you can. Every geographic name, date, number, or proper name was linked, no matter how relevant or irrelevant to the linked-from article. The result was that links themselves became less useful, and this section of the MOS was added to curb the practice of overlinking. The proper concern is not for number of links, but the overall quality and relevance of links. The purpose of a link is to help a reader at the point where he/she may have interest in the linked-to topic, not just "because you can."
Again, I am not litigating our common processes. Proceed to achieve a clear-cut consensus, or these guidelines will not be changed. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 20:02, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
References
It should have been posted here, but an editor has started an RfC concerning WP:OVERLINK on the Village Pump. It can be found here. Beyond My Ken ( talk) 00:10, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
It's about a sentence on that page which says "...the "See also" section should not repeat links that appear in the article's body...". A silly rule IMO but it's running 2-2 right now.
If a positive decision is made to keep and enforce that rule, we would probably want to add complementary text somewhere on this page, something along the lines of "...links to terms that are in an article's "See also" section should not be also linked in the body text of the article..."
IMO this would be fairly insane, but I don't make the rules, and the rules we do have should be described in all the germane places, and laid out consistently.
But right now we don't have guidance about what do when duplication is found, or about when duplication is considered (you are adding new material, and you want to link a term, but its already in the "See also" section, what do you do -- remove it from "See also", or refrain from linking the term in the body text?). "Leave it up to the editor" is an option. But we're going to have to figure this out if the RfC I pointed do results in a positive affirmation of the rule. Herostratus ( talk) 00:19, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
If something is called "The Trump Organization" is it better to link the definite article "the", i.e. to The Trump Organization rather than the Trump Organization. The page doesn't seem to cover that. Siuenti ( talk) 20:57, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
Please come participate in the discussion at WP:VPP#Date links on portal date-specific pages. Thank you. ··· 日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 17:47, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
I don’t know which words are considered “understood by most readers.”
Should “
video game” and/or “
multiplayer video game” be linked in articles such as
Overwatch (video game) and
Team Fortress 2?
―
PapíDimmi (
talk |
contribs)
04:12, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
There is a discussion at
Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#"Bare" / "Raw" URLs in common style guides regarding how URLs in citations should be formatted. It relates to the part of this guideline (
MOS:LINKSTYLE) that states: "The text needs to make sense to readers who cannot follow links. Users may print articles or read offline, and Wikipedia content may be encountered in republished form, often without links.
"
AHeneen (
talk)
15:26, 14 May 2017 (UTC)
WP:MOSLINK#Red links does not mention that adding red links to persons is forbidden, where WP:REDLINK does. This ban is being discussed at Wikipedia talk:Red link#Personal names redux. If the ban is supported by the community, it should be mentioned more upfront here to avoid confusion. Erik ( talk | contrib) ( ping me) 12:47, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Regarding WP:REDLINK, there is an RfC about red links for persons. Editors are invited to comment here. Erik ( talk | contrib) ( ping me) 16:44, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
I was wondering if someone could instruct on the legitimacy of a policy link in an article. In List of films in the public domain in the United States the word "notable" is wikilinked to Wikipedia:Notability in the second sentence of the lead. The MOS does not seem to prohibit this type of link but this is the first time I have encountered an article link taking readers under the hood of Wikipedia, so to speak. Is this an acceptable form of linking in an article? Betty Logan ( talk) 18:32, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
I'm involved in a dispute relating to this change, but should the following be listed as an example of a WP:SEAOFBLUE problem:
There is an unlinked comma, but I have to look carefully to notice the difference, even though I put it in. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 15:50, 29 June 2017 (UTC)
Regarding MOS:INFOBOX, there is an RfC about red links in infoboxes. Editors are invited to comment here. Erik ( talk | contrib) ( ping me) 18:51, 19 July 2017 (UTC)
I've never understood the "problem" with overlinking, it's not as though it makes the article difficult to read, and the reader is not obligated to use the links, so what's the actual problem with these links? Best regards. DynamoDegsy ( talk) 15:16, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
How do we handle a case like Major League Soccer records and statistics where teams and player names are repeated in separate lists? Walter Görlitz ( talk) 05:16, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
"Earthly language serves two contradictory purposes: to facilitate thought and to prevent it." -- Garrett Hardin
Fixing booby-trapped jargon might be kinda easy, but above our pay grade. It's a specialized problem among specialists who may or might not know they are miscommunicating to the general population. The article mentions economic jargon, which in this case is a perfect example, and by no coincidence...economists are the worst offenders, IMO.
For lack of a better term I call it booby-trapped jargon; words that don't look like jargon but have highly specialized meanings, sometimes almost the opposite of the lay definition. They look like something common but are something else. Perhaps over half the economic words we all use such as price and scarcity are actually booby trapped. (I'm sure they must be common in other disciplines, but I can't think of any.) If the guilty specialty were astronomy or astrophysics, who cares? that's the scientists' problem. But economics affects us all, it's what we do most of the time, plus we often hear from economists. Economics strongly affects us. Not just for Truth, this is also important to Joe Sixpack for practical reasons.
Wiki's problem is the better communication of knowledge. An honest economist would link say, "price," knowing it's specialized jargon. But Reader would think "I already know that," and never follow the link. Communication failure. But what if booby traps were a different color?
addendum: Rats! a complication. I'll try to broaden without loosing focus. I thought of another specialty with misunderstood terms; government. And especially when gov talks about the economy. Ironically, in this case it's normally Economists who have the term or concept right.
For example, "growth," is a politician's bread and butter. But largely from politicians the general population believes "growth is good;" —population growth, economic growth, GDP growth, etc. Why that's self evident! But, No, unvested economists will say, those terms are neutral, —could be very bad or good. (Hurricanes, war, low wages, pollution and list, all cause the economy and GDP to grow.) So again, our typical reader will not click on the hypertext because he already "knows" the term. Library shelves are devoted to debunking government and economic mythology. (Some debunkers are even economists; think Herman Daly,
Garrett Hardin, or on the Left; the newsy Paul Krugman and Robert Reich.) People can smell an odd unmentionable falseness, get confused, maybe get hurt, elect a Trump. Is there a word for the terms of our beloved myths?
"If I have the dictionaries, I don't need the armies." These are huge philosophical, and more on topic, epistemological problems that are right up Wikipedia's alley. Any ideas?
CHEERS! and Hi Hopes!
--
2602:306:CFCE:1EE0:5FC:276:7014:F61A (
talk)
21:10, 2 August 2017 (UTC) Doug Bashford
I'm so glad Wikipedia has a decent policy on lazy links, but its abuse is ruining Wikipedia's core mission of efficiently communicating all that stuff. I seriously don't think "ruining" is hyperbole. It's the pits. So I wonder if the policy needs...Stronger wording?
Linking is now easier than good writing.
Lazy Links: A form of overlinking: The abuse of these policies:
1. Do not unnecessarily make a reader chase links: if a highly technical term can be simply explained with very few words, do so. 2. Do use a link wherever appropriate, but as far as possible do not force a reader to use that link to understand the sentence. 3. The text needs to make sense to readers who cannot follow links.
For just one example; I would change to "1. Do not unnecessarily make a reader chase links: if any highly technical term can be simply explained with very a few words, do so."...
Why all the weaselly mush-talk? It's almost as if Wiki is saying; "Go ahead and be a lazy, sloppy, imprecise writer if being a good communicator seems like too much trouble." (Patting on head.) (Perhaps a soft, loose policy made more sense before we had hypertexted popups, which can be a better de-cluttering tool for writers? If so, could that be suggested here?)
Conflicted? Seems so.. Elsewhere (and here) Wiki says to restrain the use of jargon. But here it sounds OK, just hypertext it away. ...at least that's what writers en mass are doing, wheeee. (links look so professional! so scientific!!) That linked jargon is an exception should perhaps be over-emphasized?
The text needs to make sense, otherwise it is just plain poor writing. Forced linking rarely corrects that, but time, care, and effort will.
"...as far as possible do not force a reader to use that link ..." is so true; "forced." Forced down a rabbit hole to read another article dripping with other lazy links and time-wasting rabbit holes——when 3 to 30 words would have actually been a far, far better explanation. It seems to me that the tone of this article coddles the writer while devaluing the reader's time and his Wiki-experience. These are not the things that build good reputations or recommendations. ...Not just a drag, but table-pounding frustrating...with just a little more discipline Wiki could be so good!
Also please, when I go in and correct a lazy link, I leave a note to that affect: "corrected lazy link." It would be nice if we could shortcut/link to Wiki guidelines "lazy links," or some such. We need more ammo. This form of overlinking deserves its own heading or whatever. It really has become a plague. Linking is easier than careful writing, it gives the surface appearance of professionalism, and sadly, is almost always worse. But beer in a nice shiny can will always beat work gloves.
--
2602:306:CFCE:1EE0:A4FD:E769:F629:1C2D (
talk)
23:35, 28 July 2017 (UTC)Doug Bashford
How does one determine what are the "major nationalities"? The examples given are: "(e.g. English, British, American, French, German...)" But then we have those three dots. Does it depend on the size of the country? the article context? something else? Could we have examples of countries which aren't "major nationalities"? Unless there is a strict rule, won't this guideline just lead to endless debate over all those countries "in the middle"? Thanks. Martinevans123 ( talk) 10:07, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
I've never been a fan of that wording or that idea. The concept is basically "if the average seventh grader can point to it on a map without having to look it up", I would think. So, no, Estonia does not qualify. My own practice today (notwithstanding my 2015 comments) is to always link it on first occurrence, and to a cultural article when possible (e.g. Estonian people) if linking from a bio. I know some editors disagree with this and call it overlinking. I have just elected to take a WP:DGAF stance on the matter. People can revert me if they want to, or emulate me; there is no clear-cut consensus, because there is no clearly defined dividing line making the cut.
We actually have a bigger but closely related problem at WP:ENGVAR: the idea of "major" and allegedly "national" varieties of English. I think it's meant to convey "the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, and everyone else can buzz off". It's generally taken that way. I think we should scrap the entire thing and go with well-codified forms of written English, of which there are three: US, British/Commonwealth, and (just in the last few decades) Canadian, which is a mish-mash of the other two. In actual practice, written English in the Commonwealth (and former semi-recent British colonies that are not in the Commonwealth, like Ireland) is indistinguishable except for informal local vocabulary differences from place to place, with the sole Commonwealth exception being that Canadian English has accepted a lot of Americanisms. Similarly, formal written English in heavily US-influenced places like the Philippines, Okinawa, etc., is not appreciably distinguishable from that produced in New York or Los Angeles, except again for occasional "local color" terminology (also found within these "major nations" as regional variation).
Put this in problem-solving terms. These are the problems to solve, in actual priority order:
— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 04:54, 21 August 2017 (UTC)
But there is a second issue. In my gnoming I frequently come across linked country-names that should point to either offspring articles (e.g. Sport in South Africa, not the generic South Africa article); or sections within the country-article or a related one ([[Politics of Estonia#Political history of Estonia|Estonia]]), because most readers are likely to ignore it. This is where our editorial skills are needed to help readers navigate well around the topic. After all, we are the ones with the topic knowledge, right? It's all-too-often dismissive of readers to supply them with a lazy link to a mega-topic.
My preference is not to "Easter egg" such specific links with a pipe to the generic country name in the main text ([[Architecture of Estonia#Gothic architecture|Estonia]]), but to display the specific link unpiped in a "See also" section further down. Let readers see and judge what they want. It's very satisfying to apply our skills to this end, I think. Tony (talk) 14:45, 21 August 2017 (UTC) PS I do think that Politics of Estonia should link to the generic country-name, somewhere in the lead. At present, there's no link at all to the country. Tony (talk) 14:51, 21 August 2017 (UTC)
Hi,
Is anybody aware of a tool that would take Wikitext and add wikilinks that have been omitted due to this policy? Something that would read the text gradually, see things like [[Douglas Adams|D. Adams]]
and replace all further occurrences of D. Adams
by [[Douglas Adams|D. Adams]]
.
Input text:
This book was written by [[Douglas Adams|Adams]] and was originally a [[radio comedy]]. The [[BBC]] had commissioned the radio comedy from Adams.
Output text:
This book was written by [[Douglas Adams|Adams]] and was originally a [[radio comedy]]. The [[BBC]] had commissioned the [[radio comedy]] from [[Douglas Adams|Adams]].
Of course the goal is not to perform such edits on Wikipedia (as it goes against the policy) but rather to use these links for entity extraction from wikitext. Of course, such a tool could potentially insert wrong wikilinks, and would need to be used with care.
Cheers, − Pintoch ( talk) 11:55, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
[[...]]
, and also excluded false positive like [[File:...]]
(but looked inside them for [[File:...[[...]]...]]
). Whether someone's done it already or is willing to isn't an MoS question, though. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
09:14, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
Fellow editors,
It's likely that we'll be living with increasing amounts of Wikidata-generated text on the English Wikipedia. Yet it's being generated in Berlin by developers and programmers in the German chapter without reference to the stylistic consensus that has painstakingly evolved on this site over the past 14 years.
I believe we should be taking more than a little interest in the style and formatting of Wikidata outputs. I've sounded a warning at the Wikidata state of affairs discussion that has been playing out during September. That page contians many expressions of caution, dismay, and alarm at the potential pitfalls of Wikidata's ability to roll out text at its whim, and at the lack of control we will have over the inevitable encroachments on en.WP.
Wikidata is an important project that will be riding the transition from biological algorithms (that's us, as creative editors) to electronic algorithms (that's machines that generate and read WP text). It's the latter that will slowly grow to dominate WMF sites from the mid-2020s onward, in a process that will be occurring in the economy at large in the first half of the century.
I urge editors to keep abreast of the developments, and to be ready to insist that Wikidata consult us on style and formatting before releasing on our site each displayed text that it proposes. This should be a matter of established protocol, in my view.
Tony (talk) 10:24, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
could you give a few examples of where this Wikidata-generated text appears on en.WP?There is an active dispute over articles containing descriptive text taken from Wikidata when viewed on mobile (currently disabled for browser-based-mobile on EnWiki-only, but Wikidata text is still placed on articles in app-mobile). The same wikidata text is attached to articles on search results, in the link-tool inside Visual Editor, and likely elsewhere. There is also hot battle over replacing refs with {{Cite Q|Q######}} which completely replaces the ref with Wikidata. Not currently live on Wikipedia, the VillagePumpTechnical MAPLINK request you just supported involves full Wikidata database queries to retrieve arbitrary batches of Wikidata items to construct a map. If Wikidata displays Ohio shaped like a penis, approximately zero-point-zero-zero percent of editors will be able to read that raw database query to find the Wikidata edit that needs to be reverted to fix that vandalism. Alsee ( talk) 16:03, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
It's a political entity.-- Prisencolin ( talk) 05:55, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
Apologies if this is overly elementary, but I have not happened upon specific guidance yet: Recently I've seen several cases of plays being linked to the person represented in the title. As an example, Nathaniel Lee wrote a play called Mithridates (which has no Wikipedia article) and it is currently linked to Mithridates VI of Pontus. Now, that's indeed the guy the play is about, but surely this is bad practice, right? The reference in Nathaniel Lee is unambiguously to a play, and it links to a person. By-the-bye, Mithridates VI of Pontus does not even mention Lee's play (though it mentions other works, e.g. by Jean Racine) -- I could imagine that if a work of art (without its own article) featured very prominently in a biographical article, then maybe such a practice could be condoned (although I'd still find it far from ideal), but broadly speaking such links should be de-linked with extreme prejudice, shouldn't they? Thanks. Phil wink ( talk) 03:36, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
The current policy, "Items within quotations should not generally be linked; instead, consider placing the relevant links in the surrounding text or in the "See also" section of the article." from MOS:LINKSTYLE is overly restrictive. This policy has been discussed on a number of occasions previously, but petered out inconclusively. See, e.g. Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_186#Proposed_revision:_links_within_quotes (warning, LONG)
My proposal, in the light that discussion: "Be conservative when linking within quotations; link only to targets that correspond to the meaning clearly intended by the quote's author. Where possible, link from text outside of the quotation instead – either before it or soon after. (If quoting hypertext, add an editorial note, [link in original] or [link added], as appropriate, to avoid ambiguity as to whether the link was made by the original author.)"
NPalgan2 ( talk) 07:58, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
I have noticed that the shortcuts WP:DUPLINK and WP:REPEATLINK overshoot the target. I have added the section Duplicate and repeat links, and I'm hoping someone can get the shortcuts to go there. Thank you. 50.64.119.38 ( talk) 06:16, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
anchor}}
and {{
shortcut}}
templates. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk)
08:44, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
At present, 25 November 2017, Manual of Style/Linking only uses three instances of the term "wikilink" in the main body of text; one of which is simply as part of the title of a {{ section link}} to another page (eg Help:Link § Wikilinks).
Has the term "wikilink" officially gone out of fashion in some manner? Ie was there some explicit previous discussion regarding this? Or is it just an example of a drift in taste over time? And/or ... ?
The situation came to my notice while looking into the
WP:Wikilinks redirect.
Thanks for your time and attention, -- A Fellow Editor ( talk) 21:38, 25 November 2017 (UTC)
Help:Link § Wikilinks, quoted
|
---|
A wikilink (or internal link) links a page to another page within English Wikipedia. In wikitext, links are enclosed in doubled square brackets like this: Use a vertical bar "|" (the "pipe" symbol — see Wikipedia:Piped link for how to type one) to create a link while labelling it with a different name on the original page. The first term inside the brackets is the link (the page you would be taken to), while anything you type after the vertical bar is what that link looks like on the original page. Here are some examples: [...] |
What's the deal with including "the" in wikilinks?
Seems to me they should be excluded when they're not part of the title of a work. So that means, for example, we should link like this:
First: should this be covered in the MoS? (Maybe it is already and I'm missing it?)
Second: assuming I'm right about excluding "the", was I right to be reverted when I changed " the Holocaust" to "the Holocaust" on the David Irving article recently? I suspect this was done because the article title itself is " The Holocaust". I have separate opinions about including "the" in article titles, but putting those aside, does this not create an inconsistent linking style? Popcornduff ( talk) 03:42, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Sounds like overkill (policy creep) to me. While I'll concur that it's generally advisable to just wikilink the title term and not an accompanying article (grammar)—and doing so conveniently saves having to add a pipe and target in markup—I can also think of times where I've intentionally made an exception. Like when an article title being linked is very short and one wants to be sure the wikilink is readily apparent to readers ('readers', those mysterious beasts for whom we—ostensibly—do this all for). Or in cases where stretching the span of a wikilink may otherwise serve as a convenient form of emphasis.
Speaking of overkill ... Complicating a simple direct wikilink like [[the Holocaust]]
into the [[the Holocaust|Holocaust]]
just to satisfy one's personal pet peeve seems a bit over-the-top to me. Especially when one takes into account that the article, "the Holocaust", is presumably so titled because it conforms to common usage familiar to general readers with minimal
wp:astonishment. Please stop.
A cautionary note – when technically minded folk with a penchant for order, consistency, and control get caught up in the zeal of a systematization crusade unpleasantness can result. At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, if one reflects a bit they may notice an iconic example of the extremity of such already embedded in this discussion.
Thanks for your time and attention, -- A Fellow Editor ( talk)
Re: "Yikes." – Ooops, sorry, I may have been coming on a bit strong myself. "Please stop." probably could have been better phrased as "Please don't make a habit of repeating such in similar circumstances."
I tend to give a fair bit of thought to formatting and would have been irked if you'd come along and reformatted an edit I'd made in such a manner.
As to The Holocaust's title choice and lead emphasis and such ... Speculating off-the-cuff I'm thinking an urge to clearly distinguish "The Holocaust" from "a holocaust" may have affected prevalence in available sources ... Perhaps a sort of ' branding-a-cause' comes into play as well. I grew up around Columbus, Ohio and one of our regional icons, The Ohio State University, can be very particular about including the "The". [n 1]
Mayhap a good way to explore the topic further would be to go ahead and post an inquiry over at Talk:The Holocaust. Relevant stuff may have come up in discussion before—and if not you've an opportunity to stimulate some reflection.
G'luck, -- A Fellow Editor ( talk) 07:18, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
note
Popcornduff, a discussion elsewhere (regarding
WP:SHORTCUTs) brought my attention to
wp:NotBroken/DoNotFixIt which—though specifically addressing a slightly different context—may offer something of value in relation to wikilinks of articles as well. Perhaps try mentally amending the section heading to § Do not "fix" links to redirects [and articles] that are not broken
.
Specifically, in regard to: • Introducing unnecessary invisible text makes the article more difficult to read in page source form.
, and, • Non-piped links make better use of the "what links here" tool, making it easier to track how articles are linked and helping with large-scale changes to links.
Hope this helps, -- A Fellow Editor ( talk) 14:41, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
The team then published [[Report on the Progress of the Underwater Basketweaving Proposal|the report]]
, where using the [[Report on the Progress of the Underwater Basketweaving Proposal|report]]
would misleadingly imply a link to the page
Report. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
12:07, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
The MOS:DUPLINK material used to simply be under the WP:Overlink (MOS:OVERLINK) section (without a subheading), and that was not too long ago. So it's still the case that when editors point to WP:Overlink, they mean what MOS:DUPLINK states. Of course, MOS:DUPLINK is right beneath WP:Overlink, but it might be confusing to have the MOS:DUPLINK and MOS:LEADLINK sections separate from the WP:Overlink section. It's all overlinking, or at least it was before the separation. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 21:09, 15 December 2017 (UTC) Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 21:27, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
From a technical standpoint, this is all that need be done [5]. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 02:13, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
MOS:LINKSTYLE currently says:
Items within quotations should not generally be linked; instead, consider placing the relevant links in the surrounding text or in the "See also" section of the article.
Should this be changed to
Be conservative when linking within quotations; link only to targets that correspond to the meaning clearly intended by the quote's author. Where possible, link from text outside of the quotation instead – either before it or soon after. (If quoting hypertext, add an editorial note, [link in original] or [link added], as appropriate, to avoid ambiguity as to whether the link was made by the original author.)
NPalgan2 ( talk) 18:08, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
If you Yankees can send a tamping bar through a fellow's brain and not kill him, I guess there are not many can shoot a bullet between a man's mouth and his brains, stopping just short of the medulla oblongata, and not touch either
He is the index case for personality change due to frontal lobe damage
Collapse digression in which A scolds B for trivially altering C's post – and C doesn't care
|
---|
|
editors should be *especially* sparing with links in quotations", but that is not what has been proposed. I agree with John (and the current LWQ) that wikilinking changes the sense of a quotation. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) ( talk) 02:58, 27 October 2017 (UTC)
As much as possible, avoid linking from within quotes, which may clutter the quotation, violate the principle of leaving quotations unchanged, and mislead or confuse the reader.If consensus is achieved to change MOS:LINKSTYLE, this may also need to be tweaked, depending on what changes (if any) are adopted. NPalgan2 ( talk) 18:13, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
As much as possible, avoid linking from within quotes, which may clutter the quotation, violate the principle of leaving quotations unchanged, and mislead or confuse the reader.E Eng 03:42, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
Comment: If the wording is changed, the "Linking" section ( MOS:LWQ) of MOS:QUOTE should be changed to match. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 21:18, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
Hi, I want to add a name of notable person in the notable people section in my district wikipedia article. But the wikipedia article of that person doesn't exist. So, Can I add a citation to that person's name which links to a webpage informing that person belonging to respective district? Rishi Muni ( talk) 21:08, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
WP:EGG currently links to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking § Piped links § Intuitiveness. WP:EASTER and WP:EASTEREGG (and who knows how many others) currently link to Wikipedia:Piped link § Transparency. The two sections do not link to each other. (I am not watching this page, so please ping me if you want my attention.) wumbolo ^^^ 11:48, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
Please see
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Linking to wikidata.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
13:54, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
It's been pointed out to me by Verbcatcher that there is a guideline as follows: "To avoid reader confusion, inline interlanguage, or interwiki, linking within an article's body text is generally discouraged. ... {{ Interlanguage link}} template may be helpful to show a red link accompanied by an interlanguage link if no article exists in English Wikipedia." In my opinion, this is far more confusing to the reader than the straightforward inclusion of the link. I create a lot of interwiki links to Welsh-language articles, and I can't see how Dewi Emrys can possibly be more confusing than plonking Dewi Emrys in the middle of the text. Do others really feel that the average reader will know what "cy" means and that it will help them if they aren't able to read Welsh? Also, do others believe that a red link is more "helpful" than a link to an article in another language which they actually may be able to read? Deb ( talk) 08:14, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
[[:cy:Dewi Emrys|Dewi Emrys]]
syntax is that missing articles do not show as red links, for example
Dewo Emrys, which shows as blue in my browser. This confused me when editing this
old version of Missions (TV series), where a list of blue links consisted mostly of links to missing articles in French Wikipedia.
Verbcatcher (
talk)
15:59, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
{{ill|Dewi Emrys|Welsh}}
or having the template output the code would mean a 200-line switch statement incorporated in order to properly output/link. It's not impossible, but it's a huge waste of time and effort to fix something that is (technically speaking) not broken at the moment.it would require a fundamental change in the template coding; right now the language code is the input because it is the prefix used for the ILL itself. Inputting as either {{ill|Dewi Emrys|Welsh}}
or having the template output the code would mean a 200-line switch statement incorporated in order to properly output/link. It's not impossible, but it's a huge waste of time and effort to fix something that is (technically speaking) not broken at the moment.
I am skeptical, seeing as that time and effort has already gone into both
Module:Citation/CS1 and
Module:Lang. --
Izno (
talk)
18:29, 7 June 2018 (UTC)
Should possessive and contraction suffixes be included in wikilinks? For example, [[Goethe]]'s
(
Goethe's) or [[Goethe|Goethe's]]
(
Goethe's)? Suffixes beginning with apostrophes aren't
included in the link automatically. I reckon whatever the conclusion of this conversation is, it should be added to
MOS:Linking#Piped links.
Daask (
talk)
13:42, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
"a method comparable to [[Zapffe]]'s"
and "about [[Sigmund Freud|Freud's]] concepts"
"elements of [[Carl Maria von Weber]]'s opera"
and "by [[Friedrich Engels|Engels's]] book"
"at [[R. B. Braithwaite|Richard Braithwaite]]'s rooms"
and "it did in [[Otto Weininger|Weininger's]] case"
"of [[Christopher Hampton]]'s play"
and "by [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler's]] regime"
I'm sure the inconsistencies are everywhere, but as I also said,
I'd bet only a tiny fraction of editors or readers notice, and even fewer care. I'm still waiting for you to address that last bit. E Eng 04:56, 9 June 2018 (UTC)
If every minor edit war led to a new MOS provision, MOS would be literally bigger than all of article space. The two discussions I linked (i.e. two of your "three") are one person apparently wondering about the question in the abstract, and one who foolishly started "fixing" this issue (in one direction or the other) using automation, and was told to stop that. That's so far from what justifies a new MOS provision it isn't even funny. And so, tiresomely referring yet again to my personal standards in these matters, I ask for evidence that...
1. There is a manifest a priori need for project-wide consistency (e.g. "professional look" issues such as consistent typography, layout, etc. -- things which, if inconsistent, would be noticeably annoying, or confusing, to many readers); OR
2. Editor time has, and continues to be, spent litigating the same issue over and over on numerous articles, either
(a) with generally the same result (so we might as well just memorialize that result, and save all the future arguing), or
(b) with different results in different cases, but with reason to believe the differences are arbitrary, and not worth all the arguing -- a final decision on one arbitrary choice, though an intrusion on the general principle that decisions on each article should be made on the Talk page of that article, is worth making in light of the large amount of editor time saved.
I claim that (1) doesn't obtain, but am open to evidence. (2a) clearly isn't on. Any evidence of (2b), other than your one minor edit war? E Eng 17:31, 10 June 2018 (UTC)
Is the term "de facto" sufficiently unfamiliar to readers that it should be wikilinked in general articles that are not primarily about law, domestic relationships, terms of Latin original etc.? Thanks Nurg ( talk) 01:49, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
What's the policy on directly linking to template namespace from article namespace? Or rather, template namespace directly linking to template namespace. I'm talking about articles using navboxes like {{ 1877 shipwrecks}} and {{ 2014 railway accidents}}. Both link to the previous and the following year's templates.
It's weird to land on a blank page with just a navbox (or template documentation) and I can't imagine this is how it was intended. Jay D. Easy ( talk) 10:52, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
The section "What generally should not be linked" as written is rather unclear.
First, "This generally includes major examples of geographic features". It's a bit confusing because the word "this" could refer to "names of subjects with which most readers will be at least somewhat familiar" OR it could refer to "unless there is a contextually important reason to link". I think it means the former, but the ambiguity makes this a bit hard to understand.
Second, what is meant by the sub-bullet "Pairs of contrasting examples:". This isn't clear at all. Can someone explain? What pairs? How is "Prussian" a pair? How are these contrasting?
Third, what is meant by "These are two ends of a spectrum"? Does the word "these" refer to the previous two sub-bullets?
It would be great if this whole section were written a bit more clearly. Coastside ( talk) 20:36, 30 December 2018 (UTC)
I'd like to get more information about WP:OVERLINK. I think the policy is very much like MOS:BOLD and similarly people can't get used to overdoing it. I think one or two links per sentence should in most cases be more than enough. Particularly I see people linking to " review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes" and it seems to me a very clear example of overlink, since if readers need an explanation they'll get it from the Rotten Tomatoes link. Similarly editors refer to Metacritic and then explain that it uses a weighted average, and I think most readers know what an average means, and the weighted average article is too generic to be really useful.
I discussed this case
overlink in film articles before with the people active on
WP:MOSFILM and there was a weak consensus in favor of continuing to link to
weighted average. Others seem to think this discussion amounted was a consensus in favor of keeping both links, I don't see that at all. I'd like to know more about the reasoning from those who are behind the Overlink policy and if they think it should apply and if a (weak) local consensus is enough to ingore it. --
109.76.143.176 (
talk)
19:30, 31 December 2018 (UTC)
I'd like to get more information about WP:OVERLINK." Which sure looks like a simple request for information, and why should more than one or two people be involved? If out of that discussion you come up with an idea that might warrant more discussion, that is a separate discussion, which needs it's own thread, outside of an insignificant request for information. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) ( talk) 23:57, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
I have been flummoxed by this as well. Usually, this comes up in the context of album articles for me: I will link all of the instruments played by musicians in the personnel section and others will remove some of the links citing this page. But if we remove links to guitar because it's a common term, then when we we ever include any links to it? I don't include links to guitar in standard running text but a list section within an article seems like a perfectly appropriate place for it. What am I missing here? ― Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 02:23, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
The article sequence begins with "In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed." In this sentence, is the term "enumerated" common enough that it should not be linked? There is an article on enumeration, but it can be argued that the word can be understood in context. Shawnc ( talk) 20:04, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
I have tried hard but can make no sense of the following under "what generally should not be linked". Here is the bullet point including the (for me) opaque comment:
Are these words that should not (normally) be linked? If so, was it a good idea to link them? Or should they be linked? Or are they pairs where one should be linked and the other not (the next bullet point says "These are two ends of a spectrum")? If so which way round? And why, scrutinising the punctuation, is there a threesome in there?
I've been pondering this even more before posting and I wonder if these are things that should normally be linked, in contrast to the items in the previous bullet point that should not. If so, the way this has been expressed is not at all clear. Yes, I think that is what is intended but what do others think? Thincat ( talk) 22:08, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
names of subjects with which most readers will be at least somewhat familiar. Now, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the idea that "most" readers are "at least somewhat familiar" with (or have even heard of) Lake Xochimilco, Aberbeeg, Tohono O'odham, and Shinreikyo reflects a vast overestimation of most readers' breadth of experience. I have no idea what the "contrasting examples" thing is. E Eng 23:44, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Wikimedia sister projects#Requested move 12 March 2019, a proposal to move that page to be a subpage of MOS:LINKING or just merge it directly into MOS:LINKING#Interwiki links. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:14, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
MOS:Internal links has this point: Do not create links to user, WikiProject, essay or draft pages in articles, except in articles about Wikipedia itself (see Self-references to avoid)
- what about links to templates which act as pseudo-articles, such as those linked in the season column
here? --
Gonnym (
talk)
20:41, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
Do not create links to user, template, WikiProject, essay or draft pages in articles [...](bolding mine) as it would just make what you call (and I agree with) common sense, more noticeable. -- Gonnym ( talk) 20:57, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
Here is a live discussion, about a mainspace template with links to other templates - Wikipedia talk:Categories, lists, and navigation templates#Links to template space from navboxes (again). -- Gonnym ( talk) 10:17, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
Section headings should not themselves contain links; instead, a {{
main article}} or {{
see also}} template should be placed immediately after the heading.
Does anyone know why this rule was made? I am interested because the reasoning may apply on another Wiki. Please ping with reply. · · ·
Peter Southwood
(talk):
15:49, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
We can make a link to the above section header here:
If we now examine the rendered html for that line, we get:
Link to <a href="#There_is_a_link_to_the_Main_Page_in_this_section_header" title="">#There a link to the Main Page in this section header</a>
I can't see anything that might cause a problem for anyone using a screen reader in that html, although someone else might know better. The MediaWiki software now strips out the [[]] characters from the header text in order to create the actual link (and the id of the target), and I don't think that problem has existed for many years. Nevertheless, many of us older editors avoid putting links in section headers through habit or for aesthetic reasons (the MOS advises not to use links inside bold text). HTH -- RexxS ( talk) 14:17, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
I'm aware this has been discussed at length before. My earliest memory of editing is of encountering such a discussion. But that was five years ago, and I think enough time has passed to invoke WP:CCC. An RfC would be in order, but first I wanted to test the water on this (i.e., there is no point in !voting; save that for the RfC if any).
Generally, a link should appear only once in an article, but if helpful for readers, a link may be repeated in infoboxes, tables, image captions, footnotes, hatnotes, and at the first occurrence after the lead.
The current guidance seems predicated on two assumptions: (1) That articles are read top down, rather than using the table of contents to skip to a section of interest (why make links of TOC entries, then?), and (2) that the reader will generally follow the link upon first reference (or first reference after the lead) if they don't know what it refers to. Unless both are true, upon encountering an unfamiliar term that is not linked, the reader is forced to (1) somehow know that it was linked earlier, despite not having read that part, and (2) go find that link. It's easier to just use the Search box, defeating the benefit of links—and either way, you lose your place in the article unless you open a second window or browser tab.
Even if the reader reads top-down and follows the link upon first reference (or first reference after the lead), are they expected to read the entire target article? What if they read only the first few sentences, and then want to know more when they encounter the term again later? Is that an implausible or uncommon scenario?
The guidance just doesn't make sense to me, and I suspect a large part of the reason it's ignored so much is because it doesn't make sense to other editors, either.
"First reference in a section" wouldn't be perfect (I doubt anything would be), but it would be a substantial improvement. ― Mandruss ☎ 00:15, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
Do you mean that clicking on a link in situ does not make a reader lose their place in the article?Yes I did, but I suppose it does. Stricken, not that I feel that tilts the scale in the other direction. ― Mandruss ☎ 15:26, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
OK, so you're for maximal linking of WP's article text.No, what I said was "first reference in a section". That's less than maximal.
Very occasionally, one sees links from the lead section to sections of the article, perhaps with piped text such as "see below". I remove these links when I see them; "see below" is inherent in the concept of a lead section, everything in the lead is expanded upon in the article, and I don't think anybody needs any help with finding the main text.
Recently I encountered an editor who persistently readded links from a lead section to sections of the article. They claimed that this page explicitly endorsed such links as useful, though it merely states that they can be made. The text is not entirely accurate, referring to a link from a lead section which does not exist, and I think clearer guidance is needed. So I would like to propose a change to the second paragraph in MOS:SL, from this:
[[#Promotion to rook or bishop|§ promotion to a rook or bishop]]
. You can also use the {{
section link}} template for this purpose.to this:
[[#Promotion to rook or bishop|§ promotion to a rook or bishop]]
. You can also use the {{
section link}} template for this purpose. Links from lead sections to later sections of the article are not necessary.210.55.232.218 ( talk) 09:33, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
Links from lead sections to later sections of the article should not usually be necessary, as the table of contents immediately follows the lead.E Eng 16:32, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
Seems reasonableand @ StarryGrandma who said
On a case by case basis this is a matter of individual editors' tastes and open to discussion. I agree with that take; I simply think that the page which prompted this dispute is one of those cases where lead-to-section links are more than justifiable. XOR'easter ( talk) 17:21, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
should not usually. E Eng 17:50, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
Links from lead sections to later sections of the article should not usually be necessary, as in desktop browsing mode, the table of contents immediately follows the lead.I don't like to see accessibility issues fall by the wayside. (The software behavior seems rather variable: when I open the "mobile version" on my laptop, the TOC is there but collapsed, while on any of the browsers on my phone, it just isn't shown at all.) XOR'easter ( talk) 17:57, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
[[#Media reports and comments from scientists|spread from Usenet]]
, which gives readers only a vague idea of where the link would take them; I'd much rather it was something like spread from Usenet (see {{section link||Media reports and comments from scientists}})
, which renders as (see § Media reports and comments from scientists), but then the TOC already has an entry Media reports and comments from scientists, so the link seems unnecessary. Similarly for the second link. E Eng 18:14, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
[[#Media reports and comments from scientists|spread from Usenet]]
is awkward and vanished, let me check,
here). I think the links currently in the last graf of the lead aren't too
WP:SUBMARINE-y, though to be more consistent, the one about criticizing their pop-science should point to
the second subsection of the "Aftermath" section rather than to "Aftermath" itself. (The first subsection is short, so I didn't notice that until now.)
XOR'easter (
talk)
18:49, 16 July 2019 (UTC)site:en.wikipedia.org "section below"
. It seems to be moderately common for military ships, which one perhaps would expect to have lots of details of that kind. I did not, however, try to survey this practice at all systematically. (The prose in the
article which started this tiff — happily now a much nicer discussion, thanks everybody! — would read the same with or without the blue; if it's badly written, that's a fault of mine that neither linking nor its absence could ameliorate.)
XOR'easter (
talk)
19:33, 16 July 2019 (UTC)editors often take "usually" in a guideline or policy in a stricter direction than intended. XOR'easter ( talk) 20:36, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
The subsection "General points on linking style" consists of a bulleted list, in which several of the bullet characters are detached from the text that they are supposed to delineate. I suspect that this has to do with use of the Shortcut template. Items that don't use that template look just fine.
So, should we say there is a bug in the Shortcut template, or would it be more appropriate to say that the Shortcut template should not be used this way? If the latter, then how should this section be reorganized to avoid this problem? Bruce leverett ( talk) 20:08, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
linkrel="mw-deduplicated-inline-style"],
styledata-mw-deduplicate^="TemplateStyles" {
display: none;
}
I am trying to get clarification on the guidelines as it relates to linking multiple times in tables. I have been told repeatedly that if a table is sortable then it is not subject to overlinking since we cannot predict the order the table would be read in. non-sortable tables are subject to overlinking. Am I thinking correctly on this? MPJ-DK ( talk) 20:32, 23 October 2019 (UTC)
This is most often the case when the list is presenting information that could just as aptly be formatted in a table, and is expected to be parsed for particular bits of data, not read from top to bottom. MPJ-DK, correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is you are reading from this that only sortable tables have repeat links because the top to bottom changes. However my focus is on the particular bits of data line. In the example MPJ-DK gave, just like most professional wrestling results tables, a person is likely to come in and just want to review what happened during one particular match, not the entire event.
Which definition, then? ― cobaltcigs 08:54, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
assume total familiarity with U.S. states/cities(though it does assume readers will recognize the names of US states, Canadian provinces, English counties, and about 50 major cities worldwide).
try to be conscious of your own demographic biases; what is well-known in your culture, age-group, profession or country may be unknown to others, and vice versa. Rather than a strict definition, I'd much rather provide this kind of useful advice and supplement it with guidelines such as WP:TECHNICAL. CThomas3 ( talk) 23:42, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
My computer is too feeble to load EEng's TP so asking here ;p. On Stiki I came across this edit where drainage basins was changed to include the plural "s" in the link. The plural link is a redirect to the singular article, so is this good practice, something to avoid, or up to editor's discretion? The MOS section on piped linking isn't clear as this isn't a piped link, and MOS:PLURAL didn't contain the insight either. Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 23:53, 9 November 2019 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 15 | ← | Archive 17 | Archive 18 | Archive 19 | Archive 20 | Archive 21 |
The section on
Piped links and redirects to sections of articles contains advice on creating links within articles using the format [[Article#Section|name of link]]
, and also says that it is "bad practice" to use the format [[Article#Section]]
instead of a separate redirect since it can interfere with navigation. Any thoughts on resolving this apparent conflict? —
Coconutporkpie (
talk)
09:23, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
[[Article#Section]]
links may still be confusing. As of
14 September 2016, that part read: Usually, a redirect page from a sub-topic to a general topic already exists, or should be created on demand. It is bad practice to make such links as Article#Section links explicitly, because navigation becomes inconvenient after the section is replaced by a summary of a new article. Instead, link through redirects, as it costs little and makes improvements easier.
[[Article#Section]]
links – piped links such as [[Article#Section|name of link]]
would still have this problem. The question is, which method – use of the pipe or a redirect – is preferred? —
Coconutporkpie (
talk)
15:20, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
[[Article#Section|name of link]]
renders as
name of link, and [[Article#Section]]
renders as
Article#Section. The hash sign in the second one is a straight "not nice to see"; not only does it not read well, the reader may not know what it means - worse, they may associate it with some facebooky thing, as in "click here to trend this!". --
Redrose64 (
talk)
20:51, 24 September 2016 (UTC)
If an existing article has a section specifically about the topic, you can redirect or link directly to it, by following the article name with a number sign (
#
) and the name of the section. For example [...] the link eight gluon types (typed as[[Gluon#Eight gluon colors|eight gluon types]]
) links to a specific section in the article Gluon.
The advantage of redirects over piped links is that they allow us to determine which pages link to the given topic using Special:WhatLinksHere, which in turn allows us to: Create a new article when a significant number of links to that topic exist (see WP:Don't fix links to redirects that are not broken and Redirects with possibilities); [and] Maintain links (e.g. by filtering incoming links and identifying related articles).
Why is this article a redirect for WP:EGG? "EGG" looks like an acronym. I don't see this on the page. Skepticalgiraffe ( talk) 16:27, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
Perhaps we should state unequivocally that linking numbers of any kind is not desirable. I have seen an editor repeatedly trying to link the numbers in financial figures, and WP:OVERLINK seems inadequate to use as it's not currently worded to explain why we don't link numbers. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 15:04, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
OK, let's take this from another tack. If someone is linking a number in a financial figure, what guideline should I rely upon when reverting? Currently, all I can do is appeal to common sense as far as I can tell. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 21:14, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
We have the following:
The simplest way to prevent this breakage is to add an {{ anchor}} template just above the section title, listing the section title, and (optionally) any obsolete titles or alternative titles. This method is easy to understand, reliable, and straightforward to maintain and update. For example:
{{anchor|Section name}}
{{anchor|Section name|Old name|Alternative name|Other name etc.}}
==Section name==
It is good practice to place an anchor whenever the section is expected to be the target of an incoming wikilink, either from elsewhere in the same article or from anywhere else outside the article.
The problem here is that if an anchor name is the same as a section heading, the result is two different HTML elements that have the same id
, which is forbidden - id
s must be unique within a given document. See HTML5 - A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML - W3C Recommendation 28 October 2014, section
3.2.5.1 The id
attribute. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk)
00:35, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
{{anchor|Section name}}
@ Redrose64, TheDJ, and Izno: I was the one that tweaked the advice. I did so because if one were to anchor directly below a section, they would have to scroll up to see the section title. For the record, I have done a lot of work trying to anchor presidencies and premierships of US presidents and British prime ministers respectively, and I wouldn't have changed the text had I not been reverted at John Quincy Adams. I would prefer having the anchor directly within the section title markup, and I am dissatisfied with having to place the anchors directly above the section markup (since this adds a bit of whitespace directly above said header) but given a choice I would want readers to view the title of the section, that they have been redirected to. It doesn't really make sense otherwise.-- Nevé – selbert 18:15, 3 January 2017 (UTC)
I was just reading MOS:NOPIPE and decided to write here about something I have been wondering about for a while. It seems to me that there are two kinds of links. Some link to an article that specifically describes the term in question. Others to the more general category, or general meaning of the term in question. While looking for an example, I found one on WP:MOS itself. There is a link knowledge tree which does not link to an article at all about knowledge tree but instead to tree structure. Certainly that is often fine, and often what is needed, but sometimes not what I expect. The actual question here, is if it would be possible to have a different color for the two kinds of links. That would depend on editors knowing which kind they wanted, and a way to indicate it. Has anyone else noticed this, or now that I mention it, see the reason to mention it? Thanks all. Gah4 ( talk) 14:54, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
I have just been removing some overlinking from the lede of the Charles Darwin article but have come across some links which, although they comply with the manual of style, don't add to the understanding of the article. By its nature, an article like this uses a lot of scientific terms which means that there are quite a few links required in the lede but I can't see that linking to sub articles of that article is desirable or useful when they are discussed at length in the article and linked there. As an example, if I came accross the link His five-year voyage why would I want to follow the link at that point when the second voyage is something that is discussed at length in the article and is linked at the top of that section? Could we say something about this in the guidlines? Richerman (talk) 10:45, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
I do agree that overlinking is a problem, but often enough lately, I have had a hard time finding a link after first seeing it. This gets worse as articles get bigger. Would it be possible to put a link index at the bottom of the page? That is, an alphabetical list of all links in an article? (Maybe only for larger articles.) This would reduce the tendency to overlink, as one would know where to find needed links. I presume this will need a lot of discussion before it happens, though. Gah4 ( talk) 20:58, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
In articles where different readers likely are interested in different sections, shouldn't links appear in more than one section? For example, in the nicotine page, the word "snus" appears in the Recreation and the Adverse Effects section. Readers going directly to the Adverse Effects section will not be presented a link. Zvi Zig ( talk • contribs 19:00, 24 November 2016 (UTC)
Early in the history of Wikipedia (before 2006 or so), a practice arose of "linking everything that moves" just because you can. Every geographic name, date, number, or proper name was linked, no matter how relevant or irrelevant to the linked-from article. The result was that links themselves became less useful, and this section of the MOS was added to curb the practice of overlinking. The proper concern is not for number of links, but the overall quality and relevance of links. The purpose of a link is to help a reader at the point where he/she may have interest in the linked-to topic, not just "because you can."
Again, I am not litigating our common processes. Proceed to achieve a clear-cut consensus, or these guidelines will not be changed. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 20:02, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
References
It should have been posted here, but an editor has started an RfC concerning WP:OVERLINK on the Village Pump. It can be found here. Beyond My Ken ( talk) 00:10, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
It's about a sentence on that page which says "...the "See also" section should not repeat links that appear in the article's body...". A silly rule IMO but it's running 2-2 right now.
If a positive decision is made to keep and enforce that rule, we would probably want to add complementary text somewhere on this page, something along the lines of "...links to terms that are in an article's "See also" section should not be also linked in the body text of the article..."
IMO this would be fairly insane, but I don't make the rules, and the rules we do have should be described in all the germane places, and laid out consistently.
But right now we don't have guidance about what do when duplication is found, or about when duplication is considered (you are adding new material, and you want to link a term, but its already in the "See also" section, what do you do -- remove it from "See also", or refrain from linking the term in the body text?). "Leave it up to the editor" is an option. But we're going to have to figure this out if the RfC I pointed do results in a positive affirmation of the rule. Herostratus ( talk) 00:19, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
If something is called "The Trump Organization" is it better to link the definite article "the", i.e. to The Trump Organization rather than the Trump Organization. The page doesn't seem to cover that. Siuenti ( talk) 20:57, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
Please come participate in the discussion at WP:VPP#Date links on portal date-specific pages. Thank you. ··· 日本穣 · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 17:47, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
I don’t know which words are considered “understood by most readers.”
Should “
video game” and/or “
multiplayer video game” be linked in articles such as
Overwatch (video game) and
Team Fortress 2?
―
PapíDimmi (
talk |
contribs)
04:12, 9 May 2017 (UTC)
There is a discussion at
Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#"Bare" / "Raw" URLs in common style guides regarding how URLs in citations should be formatted. It relates to the part of this guideline (
MOS:LINKSTYLE) that states: "The text needs to make sense to readers who cannot follow links. Users may print articles or read offline, and Wikipedia content may be encountered in republished form, often without links.
"
AHeneen (
talk)
15:26, 14 May 2017 (UTC)
WP:MOSLINK#Red links does not mention that adding red links to persons is forbidden, where WP:REDLINK does. This ban is being discussed at Wikipedia talk:Red link#Personal names redux. If the ban is supported by the community, it should be mentioned more upfront here to avoid confusion. Erik ( talk | contrib) ( ping me) 12:47, 9 June 2017 (UTC)
Regarding WP:REDLINK, there is an RfC about red links for persons. Editors are invited to comment here. Erik ( talk | contrib) ( ping me) 16:44, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
I was wondering if someone could instruct on the legitimacy of a policy link in an article. In List of films in the public domain in the United States the word "notable" is wikilinked to Wikipedia:Notability in the second sentence of the lead. The MOS does not seem to prohibit this type of link but this is the first time I have encountered an article link taking readers under the hood of Wikipedia, so to speak. Is this an acceptable form of linking in an article? Betty Logan ( talk) 18:32, 24 June 2017 (UTC)
I'm involved in a dispute relating to this change, but should the following be listed as an example of a WP:SEAOFBLUE problem:
There is an unlinked comma, but I have to look carefully to notice the difference, even though I put it in. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 15:50, 29 June 2017 (UTC)
Regarding MOS:INFOBOX, there is an RfC about red links in infoboxes. Editors are invited to comment here. Erik ( talk | contrib) ( ping me) 18:51, 19 July 2017 (UTC)
I've never understood the "problem" with overlinking, it's not as though it makes the article difficult to read, and the reader is not obligated to use the links, so what's the actual problem with these links? Best regards. DynamoDegsy ( talk) 15:16, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
How do we handle a case like Major League Soccer records and statistics where teams and player names are repeated in separate lists? Walter Görlitz ( talk) 05:16, 18 August 2017 (UTC)
"Earthly language serves two contradictory purposes: to facilitate thought and to prevent it." -- Garrett Hardin
Fixing booby-trapped jargon might be kinda easy, but above our pay grade. It's a specialized problem among specialists who may or might not know they are miscommunicating to the general population. The article mentions economic jargon, which in this case is a perfect example, and by no coincidence...economists are the worst offenders, IMO.
For lack of a better term I call it booby-trapped jargon; words that don't look like jargon but have highly specialized meanings, sometimes almost the opposite of the lay definition. They look like something common but are something else. Perhaps over half the economic words we all use such as price and scarcity are actually booby trapped. (I'm sure they must be common in other disciplines, but I can't think of any.) If the guilty specialty were astronomy or astrophysics, who cares? that's the scientists' problem. But economics affects us all, it's what we do most of the time, plus we often hear from economists. Economics strongly affects us. Not just for Truth, this is also important to Joe Sixpack for practical reasons.
Wiki's problem is the better communication of knowledge. An honest economist would link say, "price," knowing it's specialized jargon. But Reader would think "I already know that," and never follow the link. Communication failure. But what if booby traps were a different color?
addendum: Rats! a complication. I'll try to broaden without loosing focus. I thought of another specialty with misunderstood terms; government. And especially when gov talks about the economy. Ironically, in this case it's normally Economists who have the term or concept right.
For example, "growth," is a politician's bread and butter. But largely from politicians the general population believes "growth is good;" —population growth, economic growth, GDP growth, etc. Why that's self evident! But, No, unvested economists will say, those terms are neutral, —could be very bad or good. (Hurricanes, war, low wages, pollution and list, all cause the economy and GDP to grow.) So again, our typical reader will not click on the hypertext because he already "knows" the term. Library shelves are devoted to debunking government and economic mythology. (Some debunkers are even economists; think Herman Daly,
Garrett Hardin, or on the Left; the newsy Paul Krugman and Robert Reich.) People can smell an odd unmentionable falseness, get confused, maybe get hurt, elect a Trump. Is there a word for the terms of our beloved myths?
"If I have the dictionaries, I don't need the armies." These are huge philosophical, and more on topic, epistemological problems that are right up Wikipedia's alley. Any ideas?
CHEERS! and Hi Hopes!
--
2602:306:CFCE:1EE0:5FC:276:7014:F61A (
talk)
21:10, 2 August 2017 (UTC) Doug Bashford
I'm so glad Wikipedia has a decent policy on lazy links, but its abuse is ruining Wikipedia's core mission of efficiently communicating all that stuff. I seriously don't think "ruining" is hyperbole. It's the pits. So I wonder if the policy needs...Stronger wording?
Linking is now easier than good writing.
Lazy Links: A form of overlinking: The abuse of these policies:
1. Do not unnecessarily make a reader chase links: if a highly technical term can be simply explained with very few words, do so. 2. Do use a link wherever appropriate, but as far as possible do not force a reader to use that link to understand the sentence. 3. The text needs to make sense to readers who cannot follow links.
For just one example; I would change to "1. Do not unnecessarily make a reader chase links: if any highly technical term can be simply explained with very a few words, do so."...
Why all the weaselly mush-talk? It's almost as if Wiki is saying; "Go ahead and be a lazy, sloppy, imprecise writer if being a good communicator seems like too much trouble." (Patting on head.) (Perhaps a soft, loose policy made more sense before we had hypertexted popups, which can be a better de-cluttering tool for writers? If so, could that be suggested here?)
Conflicted? Seems so.. Elsewhere (and here) Wiki says to restrain the use of jargon. But here it sounds OK, just hypertext it away. ...at least that's what writers en mass are doing, wheeee. (links look so professional! so scientific!!) That linked jargon is an exception should perhaps be over-emphasized?
The text needs to make sense, otherwise it is just plain poor writing. Forced linking rarely corrects that, but time, care, and effort will.
"...as far as possible do not force a reader to use that link ..." is so true; "forced." Forced down a rabbit hole to read another article dripping with other lazy links and time-wasting rabbit holes——when 3 to 30 words would have actually been a far, far better explanation. It seems to me that the tone of this article coddles the writer while devaluing the reader's time and his Wiki-experience. These are not the things that build good reputations or recommendations. ...Not just a drag, but table-pounding frustrating...with just a little more discipline Wiki could be so good!
Also please, when I go in and correct a lazy link, I leave a note to that affect: "corrected lazy link." It would be nice if we could shortcut/link to Wiki guidelines "lazy links," or some such. We need more ammo. This form of overlinking deserves its own heading or whatever. It really has become a plague. Linking is easier than careful writing, it gives the surface appearance of professionalism, and sadly, is almost always worse. But beer in a nice shiny can will always beat work gloves.
--
2602:306:CFCE:1EE0:A4FD:E769:F629:1C2D (
talk)
23:35, 28 July 2017 (UTC)Doug Bashford
How does one determine what are the "major nationalities"? The examples given are: "(e.g. English, British, American, French, German...)" But then we have those three dots. Does it depend on the size of the country? the article context? something else? Could we have examples of countries which aren't "major nationalities"? Unless there is a strict rule, won't this guideline just lead to endless debate over all those countries "in the middle"? Thanks. Martinevans123 ( talk) 10:07, 19 August 2017 (UTC)
I've never been a fan of that wording or that idea. The concept is basically "if the average seventh grader can point to it on a map without having to look it up", I would think. So, no, Estonia does not qualify. My own practice today (notwithstanding my 2015 comments) is to always link it on first occurrence, and to a cultural article when possible (e.g. Estonian people) if linking from a bio. I know some editors disagree with this and call it overlinking. I have just elected to take a WP:DGAF stance on the matter. People can revert me if they want to, or emulate me; there is no clear-cut consensus, because there is no clearly defined dividing line making the cut.
We actually have a bigger but closely related problem at WP:ENGVAR: the idea of "major" and allegedly "national" varieties of English. I think it's meant to convey "the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, and everyone else can buzz off". It's generally taken that way. I think we should scrap the entire thing and go with well-codified forms of written English, of which there are three: US, British/Commonwealth, and (just in the last few decades) Canadian, which is a mish-mash of the other two. In actual practice, written English in the Commonwealth (and former semi-recent British colonies that are not in the Commonwealth, like Ireland) is indistinguishable except for informal local vocabulary differences from place to place, with the sole Commonwealth exception being that Canadian English has accepted a lot of Americanisms. Similarly, formal written English in heavily US-influenced places like the Philippines, Okinawa, etc., is not appreciably distinguishable from that produced in New York or Los Angeles, except again for occasional "local color" terminology (also found within these "major nations" as regional variation).
Put this in problem-solving terms. These are the problems to solve, in actual priority order:
— SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 04:54, 21 August 2017 (UTC)
But there is a second issue. In my gnoming I frequently come across linked country-names that should point to either offspring articles (e.g. Sport in South Africa, not the generic South Africa article); or sections within the country-article or a related one ([[Politics of Estonia#Political history of Estonia|Estonia]]), because most readers are likely to ignore it. This is where our editorial skills are needed to help readers navigate well around the topic. After all, we are the ones with the topic knowledge, right? It's all-too-often dismissive of readers to supply them with a lazy link to a mega-topic.
My preference is not to "Easter egg" such specific links with a pipe to the generic country name in the main text ([[Architecture of Estonia#Gothic architecture|Estonia]]), but to display the specific link unpiped in a "See also" section further down. Let readers see and judge what they want. It's very satisfying to apply our skills to this end, I think. Tony (talk) 14:45, 21 August 2017 (UTC) PS I do think that Politics of Estonia should link to the generic country-name, somewhere in the lead. At present, there's no link at all to the country. Tony (talk) 14:51, 21 August 2017 (UTC)
Hi,
Is anybody aware of a tool that would take Wikitext and add wikilinks that have been omitted due to this policy? Something that would read the text gradually, see things like [[Douglas Adams|D. Adams]]
and replace all further occurrences of D. Adams
by [[Douglas Adams|D. Adams]]
.
Input text:
This book was written by [[Douglas Adams|Adams]] and was originally a [[radio comedy]]. The [[BBC]] had commissioned the radio comedy from Adams.
Output text:
This book was written by [[Douglas Adams|Adams]] and was originally a [[radio comedy]]. The [[BBC]] had commissioned the [[radio comedy]] from [[Douglas Adams|Adams]].
Of course the goal is not to perform such edits on Wikipedia (as it goes against the policy) but rather to use these links for entity extraction from wikitext. Of course, such a tool could potentially insert wrong wikilinks, and would need to be used with care.
Cheers, − Pintoch ( talk) 11:55, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
[[...]]
, and also excluded false positive like [[File:...]]
(but looked inside them for [[File:...[[...]]...]]
). Whether someone's done it already or is willing to isn't an MoS question, though. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
09:14, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
Fellow editors,
It's likely that we'll be living with increasing amounts of Wikidata-generated text on the English Wikipedia. Yet it's being generated in Berlin by developers and programmers in the German chapter without reference to the stylistic consensus that has painstakingly evolved on this site over the past 14 years.
I believe we should be taking more than a little interest in the style and formatting of Wikidata outputs. I've sounded a warning at the Wikidata state of affairs discussion that has been playing out during September. That page contians many expressions of caution, dismay, and alarm at the potential pitfalls of Wikidata's ability to roll out text at its whim, and at the lack of control we will have over the inevitable encroachments on en.WP.
Wikidata is an important project that will be riding the transition from biological algorithms (that's us, as creative editors) to electronic algorithms (that's machines that generate and read WP text). It's the latter that will slowly grow to dominate WMF sites from the mid-2020s onward, in a process that will be occurring in the economy at large in the first half of the century.
I urge editors to keep abreast of the developments, and to be ready to insist that Wikidata consult us on style and formatting before releasing on our site each displayed text that it proposes. This should be a matter of established protocol, in my view.
Tony (talk) 10:24, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
could you give a few examples of where this Wikidata-generated text appears on en.WP?There is an active dispute over articles containing descriptive text taken from Wikidata when viewed on mobile (currently disabled for browser-based-mobile on EnWiki-only, but Wikidata text is still placed on articles in app-mobile). The same wikidata text is attached to articles on search results, in the link-tool inside Visual Editor, and likely elsewhere. There is also hot battle over replacing refs with {{Cite Q|Q######}} which completely replaces the ref with Wikidata. Not currently live on Wikipedia, the VillagePumpTechnical MAPLINK request you just supported involves full Wikidata database queries to retrieve arbitrary batches of Wikidata items to construct a map. If Wikidata displays Ohio shaped like a penis, approximately zero-point-zero-zero percent of editors will be able to read that raw database query to find the Wikidata edit that needs to be reverted to fix that vandalism. Alsee ( talk) 16:03, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
It's a political entity.-- Prisencolin ( talk) 05:55, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
Apologies if this is overly elementary, but I have not happened upon specific guidance yet: Recently I've seen several cases of plays being linked to the person represented in the title. As an example, Nathaniel Lee wrote a play called Mithridates (which has no Wikipedia article) and it is currently linked to Mithridates VI of Pontus. Now, that's indeed the guy the play is about, but surely this is bad practice, right? The reference in Nathaniel Lee is unambiguously to a play, and it links to a person. By-the-bye, Mithridates VI of Pontus does not even mention Lee's play (though it mentions other works, e.g. by Jean Racine) -- I could imagine that if a work of art (without its own article) featured very prominently in a biographical article, then maybe such a practice could be condoned (although I'd still find it far from ideal), but broadly speaking such links should be de-linked with extreme prejudice, shouldn't they? Thanks. Phil wink ( talk) 03:36, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
The current policy, "Items within quotations should not generally be linked; instead, consider placing the relevant links in the surrounding text or in the "See also" section of the article." from MOS:LINKSTYLE is overly restrictive. This policy has been discussed on a number of occasions previously, but petered out inconclusively. See, e.g. Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Archive_186#Proposed_revision:_links_within_quotes (warning, LONG)
My proposal, in the light that discussion: "Be conservative when linking within quotations; link only to targets that correspond to the meaning clearly intended by the quote's author. Where possible, link from text outside of the quotation instead – either before it or soon after. (If quoting hypertext, add an editorial note, [link in original] or [link added], as appropriate, to avoid ambiguity as to whether the link was made by the original author.)"
NPalgan2 ( talk) 07:58, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
I have noticed that the shortcuts WP:DUPLINK and WP:REPEATLINK overshoot the target. I have added the section Duplicate and repeat links, and I'm hoping someone can get the shortcuts to go there. Thank you. 50.64.119.38 ( talk) 06:16, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
{{
anchor}}
and {{
shortcut}}
templates. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk)
08:44, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
At present, 25 November 2017, Manual of Style/Linking only uses three instances of the term "wikilink" in the main body of text; one of which is simply as part of the title of a {{ section link}} to another page (eg Help:Link § Wikilinks).
Has the term "wikilink" officially gone out of fashion in some manner? Ie was there some explicit previous discussion regarding this? Or is it just an example of a drift in taste over time? And/or ... ?
The situation came to my notice while looking into the
WP:Wikilinks redirect.
Thanks for your time and attention, -- A Fellow Editor ( talk) 21:38, 25 November 2017 (UTC)
Help:Link § Wikilinks, quoted
|
---|
A wikilink (or internal link) links a page to another page within English Wikipedia. In wikitext, links are enclosed in doubled square brackets like this: Use a vertical bar "|" (the "pipe" symbol — see Wikipedia:Piped link for how to type one) to create a link while labelling it with a different name on the original page. The first term inside the brackets is the link (the page you would be taken to), while anything you type after the vertical bar is what that link looks like on the original page. Here are some examples: [...] |
What's the deal with including "the" in wikilinks?
Seems to me they should be excluded when they're not part of the title of a work. So that means, for example, we should link like this:
First: should this be covered in the MoS? (Maybe it is already and I'm missing it?)
Second: assuming I'm right about excluding "the", was I right to be reverted when I changed " the Holocaust" to "the Holocaust" on the David Irving article recently? I suspect this was done because the article title itself is " The Holocaust". I have separate opinions about including "the" in article titles, but putting those aside, does this not create an inconsistent linking style? Popcornduff ( talk) 03:42, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Sounds like overkill (policy creep) to me. While I'll concur that it's generally advisable to just wikilink the title term and not an accompanying article (grammar)—and doing so conveniently saves having to add a pipe and target in markup—I can also think of times where I've intentionally made an exception. Like when an article title being linked is very short and one wants to be sure the wikilink is readily apparent to readers ('readers', those mysterious beasts for whom we—ostensibly—do this all for). Or in cases where stretching the span of a wikilink may otherwise serve as a convenient form of emphasis.
Speaking of overkill ... Complicating a simple direct wikilink like [[the Holocaust]]
into the [[the Holocaust|Holocaust]]
just to satisfy one's personal pet peeve seems a bit over-the-top to me. Especially when one takes into account that the article, "the Holocaust", is presumably so titled because it conforms to common usage familiar to general readers with minimal
wp:astonishment. Please stop.
A cautionary note – when technically minded folk with a penchant for order, consistency, and control get caught up in the zeal of a systematization crusade unpleasantness can result. At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, if one reflects a bit they may notice an iconic example of the extremity of such already embedded in this discussion.
Thanks for your time and attention, -- A Fellow Editor ( talk)
Re: "Yikes." – Ooops, sorry, I may have been coming on a bit strong myself. "Please stop." probably could have been better phrased as "Please don't make a habit of repeating such in similar circumstances."
I tend to give a fair bit of thought to formatting and would have been irked if you'd come along and reformatted an edit I'd made in such a manner.
As to The Holocaust's title choice and lead emphasis and such ... Speculating off-the-cuff I'm thinking an urge to clearly distinguish "The Holocaust" from "a holocaust" may have affected prevalence in available sources ... Perhaps a sort of ' branding-a-cause' comes into play as well. I grew up around Columbus, Ohio and one of our regional icons, The Ohio State University, can be very particular about including the "The". [n 1]
Mayhap a good way to explore the topic further would be to go ahead and post an inquiry over at Talk:The Holocaust. Relevant stuff may have come up in discussion before—and if not you've an opportunity to stimulate some reflection.
G'luck, -- A Fellow Editor ( talk) 07:18, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
note
Popcornduff, a discussion elsewhere (regarding
WP:SHORTCUTs) brought my attention to
wp:NotBroken/DoNotFixIt which—though specifically addressing a slightly different context—may offer something of value in relation to wikilinks of articles as well. Perhaps try mentally amending the section heading to § Do not "fix" links to redirects [and articles] that are not broken
.
Specifically, in regard to: • Introducing unnecessary invisible text makes the article more difficult to read in page source form.
, and, • Non-piped links make better use of the "what links here" tool, making it easier to track how articles are linked and helping with large-scale changes to links.
Hope this helps, -- A Fellow Editor ( talk) 14:41, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
The team then published [[Report on the Progress of the Underwater Basketweaving Proposal|the report]]
, where using the [[Report on the Progress of the Underwater Basketweaving Proposal|report]]
would misleadingly imply a link to the page
Report. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
12:07, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
The MOS:DUPLINK material used to simply be under the WP:Overlink (MOS:OVERLINK) section (without a subheading), and that was not too long ago. So it's still the case that when editors point to WP:Overlink, they mean what MOS:DUPLINK states. Of course, MOS:DUPLINK is right beneath WP:Overlink, but it might be confusing to have the MOS:DUPLINK and MOS:LEADLINK sections separate from the WP:Overlink section. It's all overlinking, or at least it was before the separation. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 21:09, 15 December 2017 (UTC) Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 21:27, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
From a technical standpoint, this is all that need be done [5]. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 02:13, 16 December 2017 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
MOS:LINKSTYLE currently says:
Items within quotations should not generally be linked; instead, consider placing the relevant links in the surrounding text or in the "See also" section of the article.
Should this be changed to
Be conservative when linking within quotations; link only to targets that correspond to the meaning clearly intended by the quote's author. Where possible, link from text outside of the quotation instead – either before it or soon after. (If quoting hypertext, add an editorial note, [link in original] or [link added], as appropriate, to avoid ambiguity as to whether the link was made by the original author.)
NPalgan2 ( talk) 18:08, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
If you Yankees can send a tamping bar through a fellow's brain and not kill him, I guess there are not many can shoot a bullet between a man's mouth and his brains, stopping just short of the medulla oblongata, and not touch either
He is the index case for personality change due to frontal lobe damage
Collapse digression in which A scolds B for trivially altering C's post – and C doesn't care
|
---|
|
editors should be *especially* sparing with links in quotations", but that is not what has been proposed. I agree with John (and the current LWQ) that wikilinking changes the sense of a quotation. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) ( talk) 02:58, 27 October 2017 (UTC)
As much as possible, avoid linking from within quotes, which may clutter the quotation, violate the principle of leaving quotations unchanged, and mislead or confuse the reader.If consensus is achieved to change MOS:LINKSTYLE, this may also need to be tweaked, depending on what changes (if any) are adopted. NPalgan2 ( talk) 18:13, 26 October 2017 (UTC)
As much as possible, avoid linking from within quotes, which may clutter the quotation, violate the principle of leaving quotations unchanged, and mislead or confuse the reader.E Eng 03:42, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
Comment: If the wording is changed, the "Linking" section ( MOS:LWQ) of MOS:QUOTE should be changed to match. Flyer22 Reborn ( talk) 21:18, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
Hi, I want to add a name of notable person in the notable people section in my district wikipedia article. But the wikipedia article of that person doesn't exist. So, Can I add a citation to that person's name which links to a webpage informing that person belonging to respective district? Rishi Muni ( talk) 21:08, 1 May 2018 (UTC)
WP:EGG currently links to Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking § Piped links § Intuitiveness. WP:EASTER and WP:EASTEREGG (and who knows how many others) currently link to Wikipedia:Piped link § Transparency. The two sections do not link to each other. (I am not watching this page, so please ping me if you want my attention.) wumbolo ^^^ 11:48, 31 March 2018 (UTC)
Please see
Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Linking to wikidata.
—
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<
13:54, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
It's been pointed out to me by Verbcatcher that there is a guideline as follows: "To avoid reader confusion, inline interlanguage, or interwiki, linking within an article's body text is generally discouraged. ... {{ Interlanguage link}} template may be helpful to show a red link accompanied by an interlanguage link if no article exists in English Wikipedia." In my opinion, this is far more confusing to the reader than the straightforward inclusion of the link. I create a lot of interwiki links to Welsh-language articles, and I can't see how Dewi Emrys can possibly be more confusing than plonking Dewi Emrys in the middle of the text. Do others really feel that the average reader will know what "cy" means and that it will help them if they aren't able to read Welsh? Also, do others believe that a red link is more "helpful" than a link to an article in another language which they actually may be able to read? Deb ( talk) 08:14, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
[[:cy:Dewi Emrys|Dewi Emrys]]
syntax is that missing articles do not show as red links, for example
Dewo Emrys, which shows as blue in my browser. This confused me when editing this
old version of Missions (TV series), where a list of blue links consisted mostly of links to missing articles in French Wikipedia.
Verbcatcher (
talk)
15:59, 6 June 2018 (UTC)
{{ill|Dewi Emrys|Welsh}}
or having the template output the code would mean a 200-line switch statement incorporated in order to properly output/link. It's not impossible, but it's a huge waste of time and effort to fix something that is (technically speaking) not broken at the moment.it would require a fundamental change in the template coding; right now the language code is the input because it is the prefix used for the ILL itself. Inputting as either {{ill|Dewi Emrys|Welsh}}
or having the template output the code would mean a 200-line switch statement incorporated in order to properly output/link. It's not impossible, but it's a huge waste of time and effort to fix something that is (technically speaking) not broken at the moment.
I am skeptical, seeing as that time and effort has already gone into both
Module:Citation/CS1 and
Module:Lang. --
Izno (
talk)
18:29, 7 June 2018 (UTC)
Should possessive and contraction suffixes be included in wikilinks? For example, [[Goethe]]'s
(
Goethe's) or [[Goethe|Goethe's]]
(
Goethe's)? Suffixes beginning with apostrophes aren't
included in the link automatically. I reckon whatever the conclusion of this conversation is, it should be added to
MOS:Linking#Piped links.
Daask (
talk)
13:42, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
"a method comparable to [[Zapffe]]'s"
and "about [[Sigmund Freud|Freud's]] concepts"
"elements of [[Carl Maria von Weber]]'s opera"
and "by [[Friedrich Engels|Engels's]] book"
"at [[R. B. Braithwaite|Richard Braithwaite]]'s rooms"
and "it did in [[Otto Weininger|Weininger's]] case"
"of [[Christopher Hampton]]'s play"
and "by [[Adolf Hitler|Hitler's]] regime"
I'm sure the inconsistencies are everywhere, but as I also said,
I'd bet only a tiny fraction of editors or readers notice, and even fewer care. I'm still waiting for you to address that last bit. E Eng 04:56, 9 June 2018 (UTC)
If every minor edit war led to a new MOS provision, MOS would be literally bigger than all of article space. The two discussions I linked (i.e. two of your "three") are one person apparently wondering about the question in the abstract, and one who foolishly started "fixing" this issue (in one direction or the other) using automation, and was told to stop that. That's so far from what justifies a new MOS provision it isn't even funny. And so, tiresomely referring yet again to my personal standards in these matters, I ask for evidence that...
1. There is a manifest a priori need for project-wide consistency (e.g. "professional look" issues such as consistent typography, layout, etc. -- things which, if inconsistent, would be noticeably annoying, or confusing, to many readers); OR
2. Editor time has, and continues to be, spent litigating the same issue over and over on numerous articles, either
(a) with generally the same result (so we might as well just memorialize that result, and save all the future arguing), or
(b) with different results in different cases, but with reason to believe the differences are arbitrary, and not worth all the arguing -- a final decision on one arbitrary choice, though an intrusion on the general principle that decisions on each article should be made on the Talk page of that article, is worth making in light of the large amount of editor time saved.
I claim that (1) doesn't obtain, but am open to evidence. (2a) clearly isn't on. Any evidence of (2b), other than your one minor edit war? E Eng 17:31, 10 June 2018 (UTC)
Is the term "de facto" sufficiently unfamiliar to readers that it should be wikilinked in general articles that are not primarily about law, domestic relationships, terms of Latin original etc.? Thanks Nurg ( talk) 01:49, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
What's the policy on directly linking to template namespace from article namespace? Or rather, template namespace directly linking to template namespace. I'm talking about articles using navboxes like {{ 1877 shipwrecks}} and {{ 2014 railway accidents}}. Both link to the previous and the following year's templates.
It's weird to land on a blank page with just a navbox (or template documentation) and I can't imagine this is how it was intended. Jay D. Easy ( talk) 10:52, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
The section "What generally should not be linked" as written is rather unclear.
First, "This generally includes major examples of geographic features". It's a bit confusing because the word "this" could refer to "names of subjects with which most readers will be at least somewhat familiar" OR it could refer to "unless there is a contextually important reason to link". I think it means the former, but the ambiguity makes this a bit hard to understand.
Second, what is meant by the sub-bullet "Pairs of contrasting examples:". This isn't clear at all. Can someone explain? What pairs? How is "Prussian" a pair? How are these contrasting?
Third, what is meant by "These are two ends of a spectrum"? Does the word "these" refer to the previous two sub-bullets?
It would be great if this whole section were written a bit more clearly. Coastside ( talk) 20:36, 30 December 2018 (UTC)
I'd like to get more information about WP:OVERLINK. I think the policy is very much like MOS:BOLD and similarly people can't get used to overdoing it. I think one or two links per sentence should in most cases be more than enough. Particularly I see people linking to " review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes" and it seems to me a very clear example of overlink, since if readers need an explanation they'll get it from the Rotten Tomatoes link. Similarly editors refer to Metacritic and then explain that it uses a weighted average, and I think most readers know what an average means, and the weighted average article is too generic to be really useful.
I discussed this case
overlink in film articles before with the people active on
WP:MOSFILM and there was a weak consensus in favor of continuing to link to
weighted average. Others seem to think this discussion amounted was a consensus in favor of keeping both links, I don't see that at all. I'd like to know more about the reasoning from those who are behind the Overlink policy and if they think it should apply and if a (weak) local consensus is enough to ingore it. --
109.76.143.176 (
talk)
19:30, 31 December 2018 (UTC)
I'd like to get more information about WP:OVERLINK." Which sure looks like a simple request for information, and why should more than one or two people be involved? If out of that discussion you come up with an idea that might warrant more discussion, that is a separate discussion, which needs it's own thread, outside of an insignificant request for information. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) ( talk) 23:57, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
I have been flummoxed by this as well. Usually, this comes up in the context of album articles for me: I will link all of the instruments played by musicians in the personnel section and others will remove some of the links citing this page. But if we remove links to guitar because it's a common term, then when we we ever include any links to it? I don't include links to guitar in standard running text but a list section within an article seems like a perfectly appropriate place for it. What am I missing here? ― Justin (koavf)❤ T☮ C☺ M☯ 02:23, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
The article sequence begins with "In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed." In this sentence, is the term "enumerated" common enough that it should not be linked? There is an article on enumeration, but it can be argued that the word can be understood in context. Shawnc ( talk) 20:04, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
I have tried hard but can make no sense of the following under "what generally should not be linked". Here is the bullet point including the (for me) opaque comment:
Are these words that should not (normally) be linked? If so, was it a good idea to link them? Or should they be linked? Or are they pairs where one should be linked and the other not (the next bullet point says "These are two ends of a spectrum")? If so which way round? And why, scrutinising the punctuation, is there a threesome in there?
I've been pondering this even more before posting and I wonder if these are things that should normally be linked, in contrast to the items in the previous bullet point that should not. If so, the way this has been expressed is not at all clear. Yes, I think that is what is intended but what do others think? Thincat ( talk) 22:08, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
names of subjects with which most readers will be at least somewhat familiar. Now, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the idea that "most" readers are "at least somewhat familiar" with (or have even heard of) Lake Xochimilco, Aberbeeg, Tohono O'odham, and Shinreikyo reflects a vast overestimation of most readers' breadth of experience. I have no idea what the "contrasting examples" thing is. E Eng 23:44, 9 March 2019 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia talk:Wikimedia sister projects#Requested move 12 March 2019, a proposal to move that page to be a subpage of MOS:LINKING or just merge it directly into MOS:LINKING#Interwiki links. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 14:14, 12 March 2019 (UTC)
MOS:Internal links has this point: Do not create links to user, WikiProject, essay or draft pages in articles, except in articles about Wikipedia itself (see Self-references to avoid)
- what about links to templates which act as pseudo-articles, such as those linked in the season column
here? --
Gonnym (
talk)
20:41, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
Do not create links to user, template, WikiProject, essay or draft pages in articles [...](bolding mine) as it would just make what you call (and I agree with) common sense, more noticeable. -- Gonnym ( talk) 20:57, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
Here is a live discussion, about a mainspace template with links to other templates - Wikipedia talk:Categories, lists, and navigation templates#Links to template space from navboxes (again). -- Gonnym ( talk) 10:17, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
Section headings should not themselves contain links; instead, a {{
main article}} or {{
see also}} template should be placed immediately after the heading.
Does anyone know why this rule was made? I am interested because the reasoning may apply on another Wiki. Please ping with reply. · · ·
Peter Southwood
(talk):
15:49, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
We can make a link to the above section header here:
If we now examine the rendered html for that line, we get:
Link to <a href="#There_is_a_link_to_the_Main_Page_in_this_section_header" title="">#There a link to the Main Page in this section header</a>
I can't see anything that might cause a problem for anyone using a screen reader in that html, although someone else might know better. The MediaWiki software now strips out the [[]] characters from the header text in order to create the actual link (and the id of the target), and I don't think that problem has existed for many years. Nevertheless, many of us older editors avoid putting links in section headers through habit or for aesthetic reasons (the MOS advises not to use links inside bold text). HTH -- RexxS ( talk) 14:17, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
I'm aware this has been discussed at length before. My earliest memory of editing is of encountering such a discussion. But that was five years ago, and I think enough time has passed to invoke WP:CCC. An RfC would be in order, but first I wanted to test the water on this (i.e., there is no point in !voting; save that for the RfC if any).
Generally, a link should appear only once in an article, but if helpful for readers, a link may be repeated in infoboxes, tables, image captions, footnotes, hatnotes, and at the first occurrence after the lead.
The current guidance seems predicated on two assumptions: (1) That articles are read top down, rather than using the table of contents to skip to a section of interest (why make links of TOC entries, then?), and (2) that the reader will generally follow the link upon first reference (or first reference after the lead) if they don't know what it refers to. Unless both are true, upon encountering an unfamiliar term that is not linked, the reader is forced to (1) somehow know that it was linked earlier, despite not having read that part, and (2) go find that link. It's easier to just use the Search box, defeating the benefit of links—and either way, you lose your place in the article unless you open a second window or browser tab.
Even if the reader reads top-down and follows the link upon first reference (or first reference after the lead), are they expected to read the entire target article? What if they read only the first few sentences, and then want to know more when they encounter the term again later? Is that an implausible or uncommon scenario?
The guidance just doesn't make sense to me, and I suspect a large part of the reason it's ignored so much is because it doesn't make sense to other editors, either.
"First reference in a section" wouldn't be perfect (I doubt anything would be), but it would be a substantial improvement. ― Mandruss ☎ 00:15, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
Do you mean that clicking on a link in situ does not make a reader lose their place in the article?Yes I did, but I suppose it does. Stricken, not that I feel that tilts the scale in the other direction. ― Mandruss ☎ 15:26, 1 March 2019 (UTC)
OK, so you're for maximal linking of WP's article text.No, what I said was "first reference in a section". That's less than maximal.
Very occasionally, one sees links from the lead section to sections of the article, perhaps with piped text such as "see below". I remove these links when I see them; "see below" is inherent in the concept of a lead section, everything in the lead is expanded upon in the article, and I don't think anybody needs any help with finding the main text.
Recently I encountered an editor who persistently readded links from a lead section to sections of the article. They claimed that this page explicitly endorsed such links as useful, though it merely states that they can be made. The text is not entirely accurate, referring to a link from a lead section which does not exist, and I think clearer guidance is needed. So I would like to propose a change to the second paragraph in MOS:SL, from this:
[[#Promotion to rook or bishop|§ promotion to a rook or bishop]]
. You can also use the {{
section link}} template for this purpose.to this:
[[#Promotion to rook or bishop|§ promotion to a rook or bishop]]
. You can also use the {{
section link}} template for this purpose. Links from lead sections to later sections of the article are not necessary.210.55.232.218 ( talk) 09:33, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
Links from lead sections to later sections of the article should not usually be necessary, as the table of contents immediately follows the lead.E Eng 16:32, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
Seems reasonableand @ StarryGrandma who said
On a case by case basis this is a matter of individual editors' tastes and open to discussion. I agree with that take; I simply think that the page which prompted this dispute is one of those cases where lead-to-section links are more than justifiable. XOR'easter ( talk) 17:21, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
should not usually. E Eng 17:50, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
Links from lead sections to later sections of the article should not usually be necessary, as in desktop browsing mode, the table of contents immediately follows the lead.I don't like to see accessibility issues fall by the wayside. (The software behavior seems rather variable: when I open the "mobile version" on my laptop, the TOC is there but collapsed, while on any of the browsers on my phone, it just isn't shown at all.) XOR'easter ( talk) 17:57, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
[[#Media reports and comments from scientists|spread from Usenet]]
, which gives readers only a vague idea of where the link would take them; I'd much rather it was something like spread from Usenet (see {{section link||Media reports and comments from scientists}})
, which renders as (see § Media reports and comments from scientists), but then the TOC already has an entry Media reports and comments from scientists, so the link seems unnecessary. Similarly for the second link. E Eng 18:14, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
[[#Media reports and comments from scientists|spread from Usenet]]
is awkward and vanished, let me check,
here). I think the links currently in the last graf of the lead aren't too
WP:SUBMARINE-y, though to be more consistent, the one about criticizing their pop-science should point to
the second subsection of the "Aftermath" section rather than to "Aftermath" itself. (The first subsection is short, so I didn't notice that until now.)
XOR'easter (
talk)
18:49, 16 July 2019 (UTC)site:en.wikipedia.org "section below"
. It seems to be moderately common for military ships, which one perhaps would expect to have lots of details of that kind. I did not, however, try to survey this practice at all systematically. (The prose in the
article which started this tiff — happily now a much nicer discussion, thanks everybody! — would read the same with or without the blue; if it's badly written, that's a fault of mine that neither linking nor its absence could ameliorate.)
XOR'easter (
talk)
19:33, 16 July 2019 (UTC)editors often take "usually" in a guideline or policy in a stricter direction than intended. XOR'easter ( talk) 20:36, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
The subsection "General points on linking style" consists of a bulleted list, in which several of the bullet characters are detached from the text that they are supposed to delineate. I suspect that this has to do with use of the Shortcut template. Items that don't use that template look just fine.
So, should we say there is a bug in the Shortcut template, or would it be more appropriate to say that the Shortcut template should not be used this way? If the latter, then how should this section be reorganized to avoid this problem? Bruce leverett ( talk) 20:08, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
linkrel="mw-deduplicated-inline-style"],
styledata-mw-deduplicate^="TemplateStyles" {
display: none;
}
I am trying to get clarification on the guidelines as it relates to linking multiple times in tables. I have been told repeatedly that if a table is sortable then it is not subject to overlinking since we cannot predict the order the table would be read in. non-sortable tables are subject to overlinking. Am I thinking correctly on this? MPJ-DK ( talk) 20:32, 23 October 2019 (UTC)
This is most often the case when the list is presenting information that could just as aptly be formatted in a table, and is expected to be parsed for particular bits of data, not read from top to bottom. MPJ-DK, correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is you are reading from this that only sortable tables have repeat links because the top to bottom changes. However my focus is on the particular bits of data line. In the example MPJ-DK gave, just like most professional wrestling results tables, a person is likely to come in and just want to review what happened during one particular match, not the entire event.
Which definition, then? ― cobaltcigs 08:54, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
assume total familiarity with U.S. states/cities(though it does assume readers will recognize the names of US states, Canadian provinces, English counties, and about 50 major cities worldwide).
try to be conscious of your own demographic biases; what is well-known in your culture, age-group, profession or country may be unknown to others, and vice versa. Rather than a strict definition, I'd much rather provide this kind of useful advice and supplement it with guidelines such as WP:TECHNICAL. CThomas3 ( talk) 23:42, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
My computer is too feeble to load EEng's TP so asking here ;p. On Stiki I came across this edit where drainage basins was changed to include the plural "s" in the link. The plural link is a redirect to the singular article, so is this good practice, something to avoid, or up to editor's discretion? The MOS section on piped linking isn't clear as this isn't a piped link, and MOS:PLURAL didn't contain the insight either. Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 23:53, 9 November 2019 (UTC)