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

Fri May 30 16:27:31 UTC 2003

Oliver Pereira schrieb:

> I think that the very idea of linking to sections within articles is the
> obvious *wrong* thing to do.

Thanks Oliver, I think you're absolutely right. And I'd like to add, as 
I did every time this discussion came up:

We'd need
* a new colour for links to subheadings that don't exist, because the 
reader should know that the article exists, but the subheading doesn't. 
Readers won't get confused then, and editors know there's something to fix.
* a "what links to this subheading" feature, because you might want to 
restructure an article and have to fix all the links accordingly.
* a maintenance page for broken links to subheadings
* subheading redirects
* ...

This is really sick, because it frightens our editors, and they'll think 
twice before changing the structure of an article, which is a bad thing. 
It makes Wikipedia more static.

What we could do is generate a table of contents at the begining of an 
article, which consists of the subheadings and links to them. This would 
only make sense for very long articles, which IMO should better be split 
up. But others disagree.

Please don't allow linking to subheadings from outside an article!

Kurt