On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 01:17:32PM +0000, Rowan Collins wrote:
Rik Serpentier <Rik.Serpentier(a)vmw.be> wrote:
A user marks the word "wiki" as
internal link. Is
it afterwards possible to let MediaWiki mark every occurance of "wiki"
automatically, and point to the corresponding page ? Or is it necessary to
create every link manually ?
No, every link has to be manually marked as such, and there are
several good reasons for this:
Rowan, i agree to you that these are good reasons, but i think Rik rise a
question that we should think more about. Automatically linking should help
to maintain the "connectivity" of the graph that represents the wiki and its
pages, id est, auto linking avoid people start writing about a subject without
knowing that another one is writing about the same or related subjects. I say
this because i already started writing a wikipedia article seemed to another
existing one (yes, the fault was mine, i didn't make a good search for the
subject, but we should avoid assuming that people are not lazy :) ... Some
workaround i could suggest:
* some article names may happen to be very common
words, and linking
every instance of them would be ugly; not to mention that some of
those links would probably be irrelevant, referring to a different
meaning of the term.
maybe linking only the first occurence.
* if an article name can be any number of words long,
a given set of
words could be linked in multiple ways: "[[North]] [[America]]" versus
"[[North America]]", for instance; or "to [[kill]] a
[[mockingbird]]"
versus "[[to kill a mockingbird]]".
give the editor an optional list (maybe i misundestood you so you meant "such
tool would generate a heavy work in the server, since finding the possibilities
is expensive").
Do you have more reasons? :)
Riba
ps - its very easy to tell developers what to do, but to do is very hard, so
this discussion could lead to nothing if the developers have more important
things to do; even so it's funny discussing about tools that could exisit, but
for a long time they will not.... if this is not funny for you, you could prefer not
to reply me :)