Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/News/November 2023/Op-ed

Jumping around looking for information

Quoting (from rev. 1184270070:

We know a lot about how readers approach the articles that was not known when the guideline was written back in 2004:

• Most just read the lead and nothing else
• Many do not read the article sequentially, but jump around looking for very specific information
• Only a small percentage read the whole article from top to bottom

Therefore, to service the readers' needs, articles need to be comprehensive and detailed, with a well-written lead.

I agree, and with respect to bullet two, I've always found it very curious that although Wikipedia is on a hypertext platform and takes full advantage of it via wikilinks to link sections in other articles, and even interlanguage links to link to sections of articles on other Wikipedias, it seems we don't really encourage linking to other sections of the same article we are reading, other than in the Table of Contents, although in my view we definitely should, via on-page section links.

Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking#What generally should be linked talks only about linking to other articles, even articles that don't exist, but says nothing about linking to a section later on the page. It's not exactly forbidden, and section § What generally should be linked doesn't discourage internal links, it just doesn't mention them at all. (Interestingly, the last paragraph of § What generally should be linked contains two section links to lower down on the page.) The page does have a paragraph on MOS:SECTIONLINKS, but it's clear they are talking about sections on other pages.

The one place I've found that does talk about it, is a sentence at Help:Link#Section linking (anchors) and the similar wording at Help:Section#Section linking. But somehow, this doesn't seem to be part of the culture, and I rarely see it used, and it should be encouraged. Using Template:Section link could help the reader to know that it's an on-page link, due to the section symbol prefix, as off-page wikilinks are generally not implemented that way. I don't know whether you'd want to mention that in this essay or not, but I just find it curious, and unfortunate, that we don't encourage the use of on-page section links a lot more than we do, because I think you're right about bullet 2, and we don't do enough to help the user do that. Mathglot (talk) 00:55, 25 November 2023 (UTC)