[Wikipedia-l] Red links

Tue Sep 24 09:49:58 UTC 2002

On Tuesday 24 September 2002 01:15 am, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
> >I am glad that everybody's seems SO happy by how
> >quickly that issue was settled.
>
> After the issue had been around for some days, and with a lots of "red
> links" against very few (two, I think I saw before I made the change),
> and the change being less work than this email, I just leaped into action
> ;)

I think that it was a /very/ important point that the two objections came 
from members of different Wikipedia projects. Remember, this is the English 
mailing list and just because we agree to do something doesn't mean that we 
should force this decision upon the other projects against their wishes.

Even though we have numerical superiority in terms of users Anthere is right 
in saying that the rights of minorities must be respected. 

This is why it would be a good idea to have different default display setting 
tables for each of the different Wikipedias. That way each project can decide 
what defaults they want to set (big deal if the French use ?, the English use 
red underlined links, and the Germans use red links that are not underlined 
-- readers will figure it out). 

Different cultures have different ideas about color and style so we should 
have some flexibility in this regard. In the interim, this could be manually 
set the way you changed it in CVS for each language Wikipedia as it goes 
online. The default display settings table can come later (otherwise this 
feature would have to be manually "patched" each time a language gets its 
software updated). 

I still /strongly/ support having red links as the default for the English 
Wikipedia.

--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)