Nick, good points, for the particular use case sounds like a gadget for
showing external links called out for workflows around fixing them would be
a good idea. After hearing everyone's thought i'm leaning toward no icons
for the average user.
*
*
*
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*Jared Zimmerman * \\ Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia Foundation
M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmerman<https://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman>
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 11:41 AM, quiddity <pandiculation(a)gmail.com> wrote:
+1 for more discussion, and onwiki discussion to find
out why we/they've
each kept them in the individual CSS payloads for so many years...
>>> On 10/24/2013 02:48 PM, Jared
Zimmerman wrote:
>>>
>>> Its definitely a less heavy handed way of doing the thing many
>>> (annoying) sites do when they warn you that you're leaving their site. I
>>> just wonder is the signal to noise it worth it. I don't know that modern
>>> web users have any expectations that link within a site always point to
>>> local site urls.
>>>
>>>
Wikis are special, in relation to most sites, because of the density
of
internal links (many per paragraph), and the expectation that most links
are internal and will lead to a similar quality/style of information. That
applies from Wikisource, to Wookiepedia.
In wikis that don't mix external links in the main content (eg most
Wikipedias), the icons are also useful *for editors* as they can easily
notice that something needs to be moved/fixed.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:External_link_icons for a good
list of what the English Wikipedia has.
See also recent discussion at
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54604 ("Ridiculous amount
of CSS rules for external links")
The only icon that seems (afaik) completely unnecessary, and
bright/distracting, is the https padlock, which possibly could/should be
replaced with the standard external link icon. (Unless there's a rationale
for it that I'm forgetting/unaware of.)
See this 2009 discussion where Davidgothberg created a blue (less
distracting) replacement, if we need to keep a padlock for some reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Common.css/Archive_11#Secure_l…
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/60320
HTH. Quiddity
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