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Tutorial on linking skills

Hans, a little while ago I raised this issue at WP:LINK; you commented that it might be a good idea, with the rider that sufficient leeway should be given to the "grey" areas.

I've made a start. If you have time, would you mind providing feedback? (In addition, please let me know if the font-size is a little too small within Gary King's editing exercise templates; if so, I'll ask him to tweak it.) Tony (talk) 13:35, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

After just a quick look I am not sure that this is the right format for this information. In the overall context of Misplaced Pages instructions it's a bit eccentric. It creates a teaching atmosphere that is not very wiki-like and which I think is likely to affect its efficacy. Even the most willing reader would need some patience to read through everything. Now imagine the reactions of an overlinker who doesn't like what they read.

For illustration, here is what happened to me when I went through the first set: Read the problem text. Thought: Some pretty irrelevant links there, but also potential for a better one. Surely we have an article on the general concept of a minimum age? (We almost do, at Legal age, and also some country-specific articles such as Minimum legal ages in Belgium.) // Read the issue. Oh, it's only about the overlinking. OK. Hmm, public is stupid. Law and constitution are a bit silly. Either of vote and election is redundant. // Read the solution. Aha. Neither vote nor election? Seems a bit extremist as this is such a close topic. Basically we are in a subarticle of election. And what's the link to constitution still doing there? The explanations didn't convince me, and now you can imagine how motivated I was to continue.

Here is an idea that may not be feasible at all, but so what. How about a screenful of text, carefully crafted to span many typical areas of Misplaced Pages. Perhaps someone narrating what happened in a dream. No links at all. Give this to a dozen of our best editors, and let them create the links. The are allowed minor rephrasing to prevent link clashes. When they are finished, they may look at each other's work and amend their own, if they so desire. Then produce a kind of majority version, with areas that they don't agree on clearly marked and annotated.

Unfortunately I am not going to do anything like this any time soon because I am first flying to a conference very soon and then moving house over a distance of 1800 km. For the same reason I won't be able to give you much feedback in the near future. Hans Adler 14:24, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

I must say that I was put off by the overwhelming negativity of this feedback. "Eccentric"? A teaching atmosphere that is "not very wiki-like"? I can't imagine what you were expecting—let's all be teacher? It's meant to be a show-and-tell resource in which the problem gradually unfolds. This has worked very well in most of my other tutorial pages.

"Imagine the reactions of an overlinker"—it's not designed for hardened maximal linkers. No one will ever convince them to moderate and take a skilled, selective approach. They want to link as much as possible, and that is that. This tutorial is aimed at the vast majority of WPians who would appreciate exposure to the issues involved in the decision to link, and how to link.

I take your point that it's over-wordy. I'm going to try to do something about it; it's a problem in that there's quite a lot to explain for each instance, and I'm unsure I want the samples to be smaller.

"Legal age" might be a good link, and I'll investigate this point.

Your comment that "Oh, it's only about the overlinking" assumes that all matters will be dealt with in all exericses; but there are too many for that. And perhaps you and I differ here, but my firm opinion is that overlinking is a much more common problem than underlinking. Yes, I will include a few underlinkings and discuss them. In addition, I want readers to ponder what is improveable in each sample before giving away the precise problems. That unfolding aspect in critical in making people think. Tony (talk) 03:58, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

A few comments by A. di M.

• Examples could give a little more context. For example, you could bold "voting age" in the first one to make it clearer that it's the article about it; in the penultimate one, you could include the previous sentence ("His father, Gille-Brighde of Galloway, ...") so that the reader already knows who Uhtred is and that we have already linked to the article about him. (I'm thinking of a way of showing the reader that the article about the Beatles has already been linked to in the second example, but none occurs to me right now.)
• In the first example, "capacity" could be linked to "capacity (law)". Sure, that's very similar to the ordinary "dictionary" meaning, but it is slightly more specific, and considering it'd be the only link in that sentence, that would not make a "sea of blue".
• I'm not 100% sure that "class" in the last example should link directly to the Germany section: that section starts out giving obscure details about the German classification system without even saying what a class of ship exactly is; OTOH the lead of that article is short enough that the "1.5 Germany" line of the TOC will likely be in the same screenful as the top of the article, so that a reader could get there with just one click, after reading the general definition.
• You could also show examples of terms which should be linked but aren't. I've encountered these often enough, usually in supposedly introductory articles on mathematical topics where the writer might not realize that a term they use everyday could be totally alien to common mortals. This is especially serious when such a term is a everyday English word, but used with a well-defined technical meaning which is not identical to the "ordinary" one. --A. di M. 20:35, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Two more points:

• In the Donnachadh example you point out the awkwardness of having a nominal group in half black and half blue, and in the first example you suggest "constitutional provision" which (to my eye, at least) is considerably uglier than "King Henry II of England"? (Maybe "costitutional provision" might redirect somewhere; if not, a slight rewording such as "... set by constitution" might be OK; but that would require changing the actual prose and would then be out of the scope of this tutorial—unless it is changed in the problem text, too.)
• "ost all of the links": I think you mean "almost all of the links" or "most of all the links".

One more:

• Why'd you pipe the acronym into the link in the RFID example? I'd go with "by radio-frequency identification (RFID) smart card", for the KISS principle. --A.  di M. 23:26, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Feedback by Sebastian

Thank you for inviting my critique! I love the three tests - the names are catchy and relevant. Maybe we could work that into WP:LINK. I also like the idea of the unfolding hints exercises.

So, now to my concerns:

It takes patience to go through the tutorials; I don't know how many people have the time in our fast-paced world to really think through the problems. I must admit, I cheated, too, in the battleship example.

Without having seen the feedback you mentioned, I can imagine that negative reactions can be caused by the underlying problem : People put links in the article because they feel they're improving the article that way. Misplaced Pages lives from its volunteers, and some people find great satisfaction in adding links. At first glance, your tuturial seems to be only an appeal to remove links, which is a direct attack on the work many editors are proud of. I agree with you that on average we have too many links, but I think you're going too far. You seem to overlook the words "Unless they are particularly relevant to the topic of the article". For example, I think the term "voting" is particular relevant for the article on "voting age". I even would add a link to the Beatles in the second example. Not because I think anyone wouldn't know what or who "voting" and "the Beatles" are, but because it is very likely that someone who is interested in "voting age" is also interested in "voting", and because I myself often went from an article about a musical piece to the article about the artist or composer.

Details:

1. Overlinking is only one issue of many. The lead talks mostly about overlinking. I would move that out in a subsection.
2. The instructions don't match all exercises; in particular, it is confusing that they don't match the first (there is no hint and no numbers).
3. Color coding of links (black/blue) is against WP style. (See Template:Xt#Usage for a nice explanation.) Maybe you could use strikeout (<s>) or invert the color, as in white text on red background.
4. Piped link: I also used to write many piped links like "]", but from what I just learned on WP:LINK, this would be an ideal case for a redirect page named something like "German ship classes".
5. Actually, in the battleship example, I just realized that you're not as gung-ho about removing links as I thought: I would have considered removing the link to "battleships", since it is indirectly connected with the article through "dreadnought". (But I decided it's better to leave it in, per the principle of least surprise. Some people may not know that dreadnoughts are battleships.) This brings me to the last point:
6. In your uniqueness test, you speak of "indirectly" reachable. I don't know what exactly mean by that. (Almost by definition, all articles are indirectly reachable from each other. At first I assumed that you meant "1 step removed".) But I now feel that even 1-step reachabilities may have a reason to be linked, as in the "dreadnought" case above. That needs some more thought.

I hope this helps and I didn't discourage you from writing tutorials - thanks for your commitment! — Sebastian 03:42, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

In the Beatles example, the actual article does link The Beatles in several sections before that one, but, as I told above, I can't think of a way of showing that in the example. (Perhaps, bite the bullet and pretend it isn't, linking "the Beatles" in the problem text?) As for "indirectly reachable", I think it's supposed to refer to the obvious case. (Everybody would expect the first line in Springfield, Illinois to link to Illinois, so there's no point in writing ], ]. But for the dreadnought/battleship case this doesn't hold.) --A. di M. 17:31, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Since this occurs only in one case, I'd bite the bullet. (You could also add a note like "The following links have already been introduced in the text before this example...", but that might distract readers, so I would only do that if you are planning to add more exercises in which the same situation occurs, and you can establish a pattern for such notes.) Regarding the Springfield example: I think the best description for that example is not "'Illinois' is indirectly reachable from 'Springfield, Illinois'", but simply: "The word 'Illinois' is already contained in 'Springfield, Illinois'." — Sebastian 22:39, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Clearly, the exercises are too wordy. And there's always that larger context problem. It might be possible to insert a permalink to the article from which an excerpt is drawn, advising the reader to look at X number of paragraphs. But only where larger context really matters. Or one could assume that each example is at the top, or close to it. Tony (talk) 12:10, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

No no, I don't think they're too wordy! If your intention is to teach people how to look at texts and identify appropriate links, then you have to present them with some lengths of text to look at. And I don't think it's necessary to take only text from the top. If it matters for the exercise where the text is from, you can say so explicitly and tell the student not to worry about links to X, Y, and Z as they already have been introduced before. If it doesn't matter, don't bother the student with that detail, and tweak the exercise so it remains on focus. But at some point, you should also have a whole-article exercise, and for that, a permalink may indeed be more appropriate than copying the whole article. — Sebastian 16:28, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm glad you think so. But all the same, locating the explanations (which are often long) into their own clickable section at the bottom of each exercise might do the trick. I think allowing users themselves to control the unfolding of the exercises (to use your word) is good, to avoid flummoxing them with too much at once. Tony (talk) 11:04, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Learning from greengages

Thanks to whoever used Greengage as an example at WT:LINK, I looked up that article and found the following sentence:

Soon after, Greengages were cultivated in the American colonies, even being grown on the plantations of American presidents George Washington (1732–1799) and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). However, their cultivation in North America has declined significantly since the eighteenth century.

How many links would you cut out of this sentence? When asking myself this question, I realized that I would not only cut the link to "American presidents", but the whole word, too. The fact that they were presidents has nothing to do with the plant, and it is highly unlikely that someone who is reading about greengages would suddenly become interested in the article on American presidents. So you may want to include such considerations in your tutorial, too.

But thinking further, I don't think any of these links are actually particularly helpful. The one link that would really be helpful would be American colonial agriculture. Since that article doesn't exist, it would be a good candidate for creating a redirect or disambig page. It would be interesting to learn about that too, but I don't know if that exceeds the scope of your tutorial. — Sebastian 18:40, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Sebastian and A. di M.—see what you think of the new exercise based on this. Tony (talk) 03:41, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't remove the text "American presidents": if Washington and Jefferson had been just two other random farmers, we wouldn't start that part of sentence with "even" and probably we wouldn't mention them at all. I would link George Washington and Thomas Jefferson: there will be many readers (more than you'd expect) who barely know anything about these men's lives; then the link to President of the United States is redundant as both their articles link to it in the first sentence, as they should. Colonial America, redirecting to Colonial history of the United States, is not such an awful link; it also has a #Farm life section, although it starts in a way too abrupt way for me to want to link directly to it. (I agree that I'd lose all the other links in the paragraph.) --A. di M. 17:04, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Interesting that between the three of us, we all have different opinions on this. And it's not even that you can arrange us on a linear scale from link-inclusionist to link-deletionist. This indicates that linking is not so much a question of skill, but rather like an art, where there often is no right and wrong. It might be interesting make a little survey, maybe something like the CSD Surveys, to see what other experienced editors would keep or delete.

I will create a redirect from American colonial agriculture to ] and put that in the article. — Sebastian 18:01, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Just to add my thoughts here, I would also remove both the link and the text "American presidents". I would definitely leave the links to Washington and Jefferson however, in order to answer the exact question which A. di M. posed above: "who are these guys? Should I care about them?" Incidentally, I would also remove the birth and death date ranges from the text as well. The reason why is because this is exactly where links have power: the information is there for those who desire to find it. Their birth and death dates are not directly relevant to this passage. The reason it is included here very likely has to do with the fact that printed works regularly will use that style because they can't link. Print media needs to include it as a rough disambiguator ("yes, we're talking about that George Washington!").

Basically, what I'm getting at here is that even links which may not be immediately relevant to the passage they are included in, they still may be worthwhile. Reading and writing are both different on computer screens, and it takes some adjusting to get used to (one fundamental difference is that computer monitors are "active", they push light at you, where paper simply reflects light back to you). Anyway, yea, linking is very much an art form... try not to be prescriptive about it, is my recommendation.
— Ω (talk) 10:44, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I agree with some of what Ohms law says, but I am cautious about "even links which may not be immediately relevant to the passage they are included in, they still may be worthwhile." We have to draw the line somewhere, and allowing links that are not clearly relevant to the understanding of a topic is a slippery slope. Yes, there is room for editorial discretion, but every link carries a cost that must be balanced against its utility, on average, to the likely readers. On "American presidents Georde Washington ....", can there be any doubt as to which Goerge Washington is referred to? And is the article on Washington even vaguely relevant to the vegetable?

Sebastian, the "Farm life" section-link is a good one. I'm going away for 10 days, and on return will have time to survey all of this feedback. Thank you. Tony (talk) 11:00, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

First, be sure to emphasize "may" in the sentence "even links which may not be immediately relevant to the passage they are included in, they still may be worthwhile.". That leads nicely to rehashing the point that linking is an art form. I don't really disagree with what you're trying to get across, but the perception of "correctness" itself changes over time, and the "level of (over/under)linking" varies greatly from person to person. You're obviously firmly in the "less is more" camp, which is a perfectly reasonable and valid stance. I used to be there myself, and may have been even more "right wing" from your current position then you currently are. My view on this issue has moderated significantly in the last 5-10 years, and I'm willing to bet that when you revisit all of this in a couple of years that you'll be surprised at the level of your own dislike of linking. Finally, to answer the question about "can there be any doubt?" which you posed, the answer is a resounding yes. I know how surprising this can be to some of us (In a case like G. Washington this is really a cultural thing), but you need to kind of let go of your assumptions to see that not everyone will automatically know things. It's tough to do sometimes, but editing an article so that it makes no assumptions about existing knowledge is a goal towards reaching FA status.
— Ω (talk) 11:22, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

"Rightwing" meaning ... prescriptive? Controlling? If so, WP is always going to be a fluid mixture of control and freedom, rather like societies. I'll go through your suggestions (and any further ones on the exercises) when I return, Ohm. BTW, have you ever been to the French or Italian WPs? They have virtually no guidelines on wikilinks (although they do on external links—at least WP.fr does); the result is an unholy mess of blue in many articles, and a ruining of high-value links through their swamping with the trivial that almost no one would ever hit. Some people think I'm anti-linking, but I see myself as a keen supporter of wikilinking, and specifically want to ration it so that it works optimally. Eng.WP is lightyears ahead of the others, through pressure on editors to be more selective, although we have a long way to go on our less prominent articles. Tony (talk) 12:16, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't say "controlling", and "prescriptive" deals with the application of views, not the views themselves (although, the two are inextricably linked, one does not automatically follow the other). I can't really sum it up in one word, but I wold associate "the right" with overlinking (conservativeness in linking) and "the left" with underlinking (liberalness of linking). As you mention in the opening here, this is all about defining the "grey area". Anyway, I haven't really looked around at the foreign language Misplaced Pages's, but I can imagine that some of them are a real mess. There are many of the nearly 3 million articles here on en.eikipedia that are a mess (although it's not really a systemic issue here, since there are so many participants).
— Ω (talk) 17:32, 11 August 2009 (UTC)