On 6/29/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)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