[WikiEN-l] Explicit links between articles (Was: Anti-scientific bias has me hopping mad!)

Wed Oct 8 23:23:33 UTC 2003

Jimmy Wales wrote in part:

>If there's ongoing
>genuine controversy, then perhaps it's necessary for even the
>vegetable crops article to say something like "Roundup has seen
>increasingly widespread use on fruit and vegetable crops each year
>since 1995.  There has been some resulting controversy, which is
>covered in more detail in the article on [[Roundup]]."

>(Stylistically, that's a bit odd, because we usually write each
>article as self-contained and without mentioning other articles.)

Personally, I think that this is a bad idea.
Most of the time, a [[wiki]] link to another article will be fine;
even in this example, beginning the sentence with "[[Roundup]] has ..."
is probably plenty good to let people know where to go for more detail.
But in some cases, it's not clear to the reader (especially to a newbie)
where discussion of some further point may be found.
This is especially true when there was controversy among Wikipedians
as to whether some material should be on a certain page or another.
So in some cases, an explicit link to some other article
(along the lines of "For more on this, see the article [[X]].")
can be a very helpful edit.

-- Toby