Wikipedia links

[jack]

Last I heard there are ongoing wars on wikipedia between people who link every word in an article (come on, if you're reading about newton, are you really going to need to see a definition of apple?) and those who remove them again. Possibly they should have two[1] categories of link: technical terms related to the issue at hand, and ordinary words you should probably know, but might be curious about[2].

Or has someone who actually wikipedias thought of this?

[1] or more
[2] In fact, nearly everything would fit in the last category, but not quite. Maybe all nouns. But you would want to specify -- eg. apple would go to "apple (fruit)" not "apple (disambiguation)".

Comments

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

Trillian automatically underlines keywords + if you hover over you get a neat Wikipedia definition. It's really useful even though I know exactly what "nice" means, for example.

I'm a compulsive wikisurfer so I'm firmly in the "link everything" camp but also in the "don't spam, don't link 'the', and only link the first occurrence" camp too :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

OK, the hovering thing works great.

And I think I see, but "link everything" sometimes gets confusing. Eg. "In a famous thought experiment, blah said foo," is clear, but if you make 'thought experiment' a link it misleadingly looks like it's a link to THAT experiment.

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm used to hovering over to see what they actually link to, as well :)