Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-7302713-20130409112511/@comment-188432-20130411020014

Anoted wrote:

Anyway, specifics. I did come here about a specific diff of mine which prompted me to go hunting for redlinking policy. In particular, one line bothered me:

"She then picks up a tablet which shows his name and picture, and sliders marked conscience, paranoia, obedience and IQ." Well, I was hoping you'd give me something different to work with, because you seemed to be suggesting there was a widespread problem. But if this is the one you want to focus on, it's pretty easy to demonstrate how we could write these articles. At a very minimum all four of those words could have this tiny article for a start:  was one of several personality traits that Miss Kismet was able to control in the people whom she had uploaded into the Cloud. By manipulating a numerical values for, she was able to, as one of her underlings once said, "hack into" people's personalities and instantly change their metric. (TV: The Bells of Saint John (TV story))

Done. Does that define the term in a way that is relevant to the DWU? Yes. Does it get mired down into some sort of T:NO RW-violating, here's-what-wikipedia-told-me-this-thing-was? No. I understand quite clearly the idea that anything mentioned in Who can be an article, but I'd have a hard time reading that line if all of those redlinked words had actual articles. A hard time? What do you mean by that? Your eyes would rebel in their sockets? How exactly would it be difficult? I've taken a lot of pains to ensure that the contrast ratios on this wiki are good for even people who are colour blind. So I'm afraid I just don't buy that it would be physically difficult to read the line, whether the links were the shades of red and blue that we employ here.

Maybe you should use the "change colours" button at the top of every main namespace page if you're having difficulty reading linked text. My only remaining question is if there is an excess of linkage, links that are not against the rules, what, if anything should be done? Maybe a fairly good holiday article can be written. But I can't think of any relevance it would have to the article for The Bells of Saint John. There are times when we un-bluelink things, right? When there's no real relevance, correct? Sounds like you've come to us from Wikipedia. It's important to note that we're Wikipedia's evil twin. We do a lot of things in precisely the opposite way to how Wikipedia does. I"m very much aware that Wikipedia say to link in a more contextual way than we do. But a part of that is purely technical.  They're, what, more than 1000 times bigger than us.  At that sort of size, links on a page start having a cost when you run reports like Special:WhatLinksHere.  So they've got to attempt some balancing of utility versus speed.

We're probably never going to have to worry about that. So it's our policy to link everything that has an article, generally once per section, and, again, remove the value judgement. If there's a chariot or a pair of glasses or a stovepipe hat in a story, we make the link.

A part of the reason is this So what if I can't see the possible relevance between a redlink and the article it's in. Do I leave it so that the request will remain in the system? Do I leave it because red links are good? Yep. And yep. And just because you can't see the relevance doesn't mean there isn't one. Or that there might not be one once other stories are released. Or once one of our editors reads a story that was published long ago.

See, the links, be they red or blue, are helpful as long as they're present. You have the Wikipedia worry that the link be present only if going to the destination article will help you understand the origin article. Does William Hartnell help you understand First Doctor? Yes, so, fine, make the link. But the thing is that no one's knowledge of this vast literature is even close to complete. So often we just do not know if a thing is relevant or not. So we make the link and hope one day that relevance is found. For instance, there's a hospital in Spearhead from Space. But let's say I'd never seen Spearhead and didn't know that. If someone had redlinked hospital at Spearhead then eventually the article could indeed include the incident in Spearhead and therefore hospital would become relevant to Spearhead.

Linking, whether red or blue, is a valuable research tool for us. I can't tell you how many articles I've expanded (read: made more relevant) through the use of Special:WhatLinksHere. Basically, I'm asking if we have higher standards for de-redlinking than we do re-bluelinking. Hope that clarifies things. Nope: not clearer at all. Doesn't matter, though. I think if you give yourself a little more time to edit with us and sort of get a sense of how our articles are written, you'll get a better feel for things. My general advice to you in particular is just not de-link anything for the time being and to continue asking more specific questions until you think you've understood things more fully.

And here's a little task for you. Go to Special:WantedPages and pick the most ordinary noun you can find out of the list that has more than one link. Then check out what those links are and see if you can write a useful article. They don't really uses Special:WantedPages the same way at WIkipedia anymore (again: evil twin) so maybe it's been a while for you. I think once you start using the tools associated with red links, you'll see their value more clearly.