Wikipedia talk:Only make links that are relevant to the context/Archive of support and opposition

Support or oppose

Supporters of this guideline include: Glen Ford HelgeStenstrom AdamW Angela (except for dates which should all be linked) Viajero (less is more) Hephaestos Bmills Rossami Muriel Gottrop Noldoaran (Talk) Zocky Daniel Quinlan mydogategodshat Peak Herbee (linking all dates and numbers is evil) Doom (Linking every occurence of "United States" is silly, most english speakers really have heard of it.) User:Exploding Boy ··gracefool |☺ (except dates, which should all be linked apart from those in the References or External links sections) Nabla violet/riga (t) anthony, otherwise we'd just have the software create links automatically Sfahey 23:16, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) DamienG 09:45, Feb 9, 2005 (UTC) --Lifeflame 21:45, Mar 26, 2005 (UTC) AStanhope De-link, De-link, De-link, De-link Nandesuka 16:06, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC) Linking to every possible adjective is super-distracting. Chuck 18:42, 1 August 2005 (UTC) See User:Peak's comments below. Also, very distracting when trivial links are included. Link items where a reader might want to follow based on context. Hapsiainen 17:56, 22 September 2005 (UTC) GraemeMcRae 22:15, 12 October 2005 (UTC) (I would like to illustrate the point by making the following edit to the page: ... very distracting to mark all possible words as hyperlinks...) Tony (Canadian Paul, you can follow up trunk-and-branch links with greater freedom by just typing words into the box, without the disadvantages of formal linking.) E Pluribus Anthony Gflores Talk 21:58, 1 December 2005 (UTC) Silence 00:23, 6 December 2005 (UTC) Everything is subjective, that's why Wikipedia exists. And one can still easily follow a bizarre chain of links without linking to irrelevant pages. Trivial date-linking is painfully eye-catching, all that blue... Bobblewik 18:52, 18 January 2006 (UTC) Chairman S. 05:42, 23 January 2006 (UTC) Haukur 21:13, 1 February 2006 (UTC) Kaldari 00:29, 2 February 2006 (UTC) VirtualSteve 04:48, 10 February 2006 (UTC) Deco 00:25, 11 February 2006 (UTC) (We need something to point people at when we kill all their spurious links) EJ 17:13, 12 February 2006 (UTC) CRGreathouse: Irrelevant links waste time. If the text says "a Serbian election" and I see it's linked, I want it to go to that election -- not to Serbia and Election. "a contested 2008 Serbian election" is the worst thing I can imagine for usability.

Opponents include: User:Optim sjc Mike Dill Patrick Lirath Q. Pynnor tbc fonzy (retired from Wikipedia) till we *) Stan Shebs (since "relevant" is too subjective) Secretlondon User:Steeev Amber388 Daniel C. Boyer (a good idea in theory, but in practice it may be so vague as to be unworkable) Toytoy (I always add too many links to fictional subjects) Denni☯ (Ideally, every word should be clickable.) Canadian Paul (I've found that my favourite thing about Wikipedia is that I can start off with Rodney Dangerfield and end up in Communists in Azerbaijan) a_magical_me Tempshill 19:50, 2 February 2006 (UTC) (I support most of this guideline; I dislike the trivial links; but cannot support the discouragement of creating red links unless you plan to quickly run off and write the article. Red links are great.) Fornadan Staunch defender of date links ZachPruckowski 15:39, 4 April 2006 (UTC) 23skidoo 23:45, 7 June 2006 (UTC) - Don't agree with the anti-redlink policy part. N-true 18:28, 21 June 2006 (CET) — Redlinks: not everything should be linked, but everything that would indeed be worth having an article, such as languages that are yet to be written about. Vsion 02:01, 22 June 2006 (UTC) Change to "Only make links that are relevant or point to important concepts", remove "to the context". Tobyk777 04:45, 26 June 2006 (UTC) - The more interconectedness the better!

Large comments moved out of the voting block

Supporters

• Bmills (linked articles should enrich the reader's understanding of the original article without seriously impacting readability)
• Muriel Gottrop (because good sense is not universal - see example below)
• Noldoaran (Talk) (unusual words that most readers wouldn't understand shoul be linked to wiktionary)
• Zocky
• Daniel Quinlan: good style, I might suggest a rephrase to "the most relevant" along with a guideline that a moderate number of links should be used, but the intent is the same. Daniel Quinlan 05:15, Dec 15, 2003 (UTC)
• mydogategodshat - Links are overused. Not too long ago I found one of my articles glowing with red and blue links; almost half the text. Why would anyone reading an article on strategic management theory want links to "flash light", "sound", "1981" etc.
• Peak: The selection of appropriate hyperlinks is as important to good writing as the selection of appropriate words. Selective linking actually allows an author to convey additional information: "this link contains (or ought to contain) information that I, the author, judge to be relevant and maybe worth your attention." A good hyperlink is like a good guide. The concerns of those who seem to want as many links as possible are best addressed in other ways, e.g.:

• Google and similar excellent tools can be used for comprehensive searches for words and phrases;
• the "Go" box is just a mouse click away if a reader wants to check on anything that is not linked;
• if the effort of copy/paste/GO is the issue, then I'm sure the Wiki software developers could give us RIGHT-MOUSE-CLICK or some such to transport us instantly from ignorance to bliss. It would however be good to have a better title for this page. Perhaps something along the lines of one of the following?
  • "Fewer hyperlinks convey more information."
  • "Select your wikilinks as carefully as your words."
  • "A good wikilink is worth ten thousand mindless hyperlinks."
  • "You can judge an article by its wikilinks."

Peak 07:49, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Opponents

• Optim the reader wants links
• Secretlondon hyperlinks are good and are one of ways that wikipedia is superior to an paper encyclopedia. I think that linking to dates is a bit much, but places etc should stay.
• User:Steeev Without links the world wide web would be nothing, and the same goes for Wikipedia. The more links there are to articles the better. From network theory, if we take the Wikipedia as a network of nodes (articles), the value of the network equals the number of available node interactions (hyperlinks between nodes). A "mesh" (many-to-many) network has more intrinsic value to its members (more information per cost of connection) than a "hub-and-spoke" network.

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User:Steeev raises an interesting point in the voting above. Without any links, Wikipedia would lose a lot. But I'm not sure that I can agree with his logical extension that more is automatically better. His application of network theory assumes that each node interaction adds positive value to the network. That is not always the case. Irrelevant or inappriopriate node connections can have zero or even negative value. They consume time, frustrate the user and erode confidence in the network as a whole. Granted, you may not consider those costs high, but to pretend that there are no negative consequences is unfair. I don't think anyone was advocating not linking - merely that we link where the link has positive value. Rossami 04:08, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

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IMO, it should be possible to click on any word and get a dicdef or a link to a corresponding article. Inclusionists argue that no one has to read an article; by the same token, no one has to click on a link, but if one is available, at least the reader has the choice. Unless there is a hardware or software cost, there should be no limitation to where one can go from an article, except where linking each word would produce irrelevant red links. It's too bad Wikipedia has chosen underlined text as the default to display links; non-underlined links are readily identifiable yet far less obtrusive. It is a basketload of underlined links that makes a page look amateurish, even if they are all legitimate. Denni☯ 03:33, 2005 Feb 9 (UTC)