[Wikipedia-l] Re: Limits to the non-paperiness of Wikipedia?

Fri May 30 13:12:32 UTC 2003

On Thu, 29 May 2003, Neil Harris wrote:

> >My current favorite suggestion is that second-level headings (H2)
> >should automatically become link targets.
> 
> I agree; this is the "obvious right thing" to do, in my opinion. We can 
> now argue about whether we should support references for these anchors 
> as [[article#fragment-text]], which also seems to be the "obvious thing" ?

I think that the very idea of linking to sections within articles is the
obvious *wrong* thing to do. The opening paragraph of an article is the
thing that establishes the subject matter and the context - basically,
what the article is all about. We can't just throw people into the middle
of an article and expect them to know what's going on. They'll have to
scroll back up to the top again anyway to check. If we don't want to just
confuse people, we'd have to make each section pretty much self-contained.
Hmm, a piece of writing that is self-contained and that you can link to.
Sounds like an article to me! If a section is autonomous enough to be
linked to, it is far more natural to separate it out and make it an
article all by itself than to give it some strange new semi-article
status.

I think this is a case of people looking for technical solutions to a
problem that could be solved much more satisfactorily by sensible planning
by humans.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+