[WikiEN-l] Redlinks or redirects?

Thu Jun 29 17:08:13 UTC 2006

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 6/29/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>   
>> A redlink might just be a mistake, so briefly search for an existing
>> article. If it seems it could be a viable article it should be left
>> alone. I think it should continue to be a redlink until someone is
>> ready to write an article rather than being made into a stub.
>>     
>
> But if someone is looking for information on a book, is it not more
> useful to make that book a redirect to the author, where at least the
> one liner "John Foo is best known for his brilliant book, Foo Strikes
> Again, which is all about ...." is better than nothing.
>
> I firmly believe that Wikipedia's mission is to answer the question
> "What the hell is X?" to whatever extent it can, rather than just give
> up and say "no, we don't know either". Even if all we have time to
> write is "It's a book, check out these three urls".
>   

This becomes irritating when you're going the other way---you've just 
read the article about the author, and now are going down the list of 
books at the bottom looking to read more.  If some articles exist and 
some don't, you can click on the blue links and get articles, and know 
from the red links that no article exists on those books yet.  The 
situation is considerably more confusing if they're all blue links, but 
some are articles while others redirect right back to the page you just 
read.

-Mark