On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 1:48 PM, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>wrote;wrote: That is a single-year delinking, which is generally accepted by many people, though there was a bit of debate about that. This is different from delinking both date (day and month) and year, which I believe Lightmouse has stopped doing with his bot (Lightbot). As for the BRFA, I commented at some point that it was open-ended to the point of uselessness. Carcharoth

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Marc Riddell &lt;michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net&gt;wrote;wrote: <snip> That's the one I'm looking at as well. The link seems to be breaking over two lines. Does this work better? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joe_Pass&diff=250847598&o… What I see there is this change: from: "January 13, [[1929]] – May 23, [[1994]]" to: "January 13, 1929 – May 23, 1994" That is the single-year link to the birth year being removed. And the single-year link to the death year being removed. A full date delinking would have been: from: "[[January 13]], [[1929]] – [[May 23]], [[1994]]" to: "January 13, 1929 – May 23, 1994" The discussion at the talk page of MOSNUM did raise the valid point that single-year linking has been avoided for years, and that discussion probably predates the start of date autoformatting. My view is that the advent of autoformatting meant that the various date linking debates went quiet, and now they are coming back because some people (quite rightly) want to link dates for reasons other than autoformatting. Carcharoth

Year is important to the extent that I would even suggest automatically and by default including available birth & death years (though not exact dates) in the heading, as an guide to navigation and relevance, just as I would always include the name of the title or author of the fiction for a fictional character's name in a heading. Our attempt to make headings look as simple as possible has gone too far to be for the benefit of the reader. Yes, the time will come when an ordinary reader even on a public computer will be able to adjust this and all sorts of things in personalized settings-- and will know how to do so and routinely use the capability with the same ease as people now select ring tones. While people spend the next decade working on this, we should adjust our defaults to help the average person-- who comes to Wikipedia not for elegance, but information. On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 10:32 AM, Marc Riddell &lt;michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net&gt; wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 8:00 PM, Charlotte Webb &lt;charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: Oh, OK. Do you know: (a) When autoformatting first started? (b) Whether year or date linking was being done before date autoformatting started? Agree. Though human audits using scripts work quite well if the human has clue. Not so sure about this. The articles can still be accessed through the calendar templates and the category system. Instead of clicking on the year link, you click one of the date-related categories, and navigate your way to the relevant date page that way. It is a fair point that not everyone will want to do this, so not having the dates linked from the main text of an article as default is a good thing there (I think links in infoboxes and tables and lists are different). I'm actually rather sympathetic to the notion that link-quality in the main body of the text of an article is improved if it is kept to the most relevant links. In other words, the links act as a carefully selected mix of background articles and sister and daughter articles. Overlinking ruins this careful mix of links. I use whatlinkshere a lot, and I agree with you that it can be very useful. There are other ways to generate the same "metadata" (e.g. articles with a certain year mentioned) without using links. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:METADATA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographical_metadata If you look at the way the geographical co-ords system is set up, the information is in articles, and machine-readable, but it doesn't interfere with the main body of the text. So all articles with co-ords within a certain range can be identified using a computer, instead of a human. That was one of the main arguments against date delinking, that a lot of potential information that could be generated by analysing the links was being lost. There was a proposal to replace linked dates with a template that would still tag the dates, but not link them. Not sure what happened to that. Changing subject completely, one of my big gripes is the way that bloated templates stuck at the bottom of an article pollute "whatlinkshere" with irrelevant links. For example, although hardly any of the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry are mentioned in the main text of Marie Curie, they are all in the "whatlinkshere" list because each Nobel Laureate has all the Nobel Laureates listed in a template at the bottom of each article. Indeed, every single Nobel Laureate in Chemistry appears in the "whatlinkshere" list for each Laureate. If instead of the template, there was a link to a list, or a link to a category, then "whatlinkshere" would be much cleaner and could actually be checked carefully to see if all the links are being used correctly. Ditto for listing the outgoing links. If links from transcluded templates could be semantically distinguished from links from the actual articles, that would be great. In principle, could that be done? Carcharoth

2008/11/11 Carcharoth &lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt;om>: You can sort of do this with whatlinkshere as it is today, I think: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Marie_Curie WLH currently has three buttons at the top - to show/hide "transclusions", "links" and "redirects". Redirects works, transclusions doesn't seem to (at least not for me just now). If this can be fixed, it presumably would give us exactly what you're looking for... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 4:09 PM, Carcharoth &lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: Should clarify things here: 1) Listing of the transclusions of a page on other pages (already done in whatlinkshere) 2) Listing of the pages that have a link to a page (already done in whatlinkshere) Splitting the list in 2 into: 2a) Links entered as plain text with square brackets around it (detecting piped links would be nice as well) 2b) Links that are called from a transcluded page or template (not done at the moment) 2c) Links that are re-routed through a redirect page (already done in whatlinkshere) And stating which templates are contributing which links would be nice as well, to distinguish between infoboxes and footer topic templates and various flavours of navboxes. Incidentally, I remember asking once, when italics were made to show up as italics in category pages, whether it would be possible to have "see <REDIRECT DESTINATION>" appear next to the redirect name in the category. It was thought not to be a good idea at the time, but I now see that in the search results (search has been revamped re, that redirects show up there next to the results (I think the search results list the redirect destination, and bolds the redirect that you were searching for). An example is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=barrack+obama&fullte… So maybe I should ask again if "REDIRECT <see redirect destination>" for category pages is a goer or not? What would happen here is that in, say: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prohibition_by_country Instead of "Prohibition in Finland<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_Finland>" being just in italics, it would appear in italics and have "see Prohibition#Nordic countries <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition#Nordic_countries><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_Finland>" next to it. Might look horrible, but would work just like the blind entries in a paper encyclopedia. Which one was the link is another matter. Oh goodness, since I'm on the subject of redirects, I might as well point out this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorizing_redirects One of the examples there is: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Radio_Free_Vestibule&redirect… Nothing to say there. Just providing another example. This isn't about date linking, now, is it? What's the etiquette here? Change thread title? Start new thread? Ramble on and on off-topic until date linking is mentioned again? :-) Carcharoth

On 11/11/08, Carcharoth &lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: Oh, I just happened to notice this bit of idiocy, so maybe my innuendo was not so far-fetched: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/March_1 They could have at least spelled Roger Daltrey's name right. —C.W.

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 6:36 PM, Matthew Brown &lt;morven(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Which side? :-) Actually, there are some fair points, if overdone, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Greg_L/Sewer_cover_in_front_of_Greg_L%E2%… No response to my post on the talk page yet, though. Anyone know what a riser ring is? Carcharoth

Charlotte Webb wrote: Well, that's about all that shows up on the first page of a google images search, but in this context, a riser ring is the iron casing that forms the topmost part of a manhole opening. It's the ring on which the manhole cover rests. It's called a "riser" because it rises above the -- typically concrete -- underlying structure that the manhole provides access to. The riser's height is chosen to match the thickness of the asphalt/macadam roadway, so that the manhole cover ends up nice and flush with the final surface.

On 11/11/08, Jay Litwyn &lt;brewhaha(a)edmc.net&gt; wrote: Sorry, I'm not seeing what this has to do with date links or the price of tea in the PRC. —C.W.

On 11/13/08, Jay Litwyn &lt;brewhaha(a)edmc.net&gt; wrote: Oh yes, definitely, and to the point of negating the argument that such pages are "indiscriminate collections of information".[1] That's actually a good idea, and it shouldn't be that hard to do on the toolserver. Surely it would some new database tables to be efficient, and there would still need to be some kind of standard link syntax to distinguish a date from a poorly worded sentence which coincidentally looks like a date.[2] But imagine being able to click on a date link and see all other events which happened on that exact date, or within the calendar week of that year, or in the seven-day period centered on that day (given day +/- 0-3 days), or on that calendar day/week/month but only within a certain decade, or during a given country's "election years" within a certain century, or any of these options but filtered to events related to bluegrass music or ice hockey or Portuguese literature, etc., etc. without having to edit or create any pages. For me the only risk would be spending more time browsing around in this than actually editing. The current mass delinking is evidence that this is a silly question. I agree and I've suggested this on a number of occasions to no avail. —C.W. [1] Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/March_1 [2] A few examples here (more on request) http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2008-October/095989.html