Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-7302713-20130409112511/@comment-188432-20130411173012

Anoted wrote: And no, the problem isn't visual, though on that note, it is insanely difficult to read links that have already been clicked on. In one color theme clicked-through links are the same color as text and therefore they vanish into ordinary text. Except for the fact that mouseovers result in a highly legible highlight. And you seem to be trying to have it both ways. On the one hand you're saying you don't like it that you can see so many links, but on the other, you complain about the fact that links you have already clicked on recede into the normal text colour. I would have thought you would have liked that feature, based on your observations so far. In another there is no differentiation between links I've clicked on and those I haven't, making it a bit difficult to keep track of things. Are you sure you haven't come to us from Wikipedia? It's usually only heavy Wikipedia users who notice or care about the "visited" colour differentiation. Wikia default is to not distinguish between those things you've clicked on and those you haven't. The light-on-dark skin is a concession to the way that Wikia wikis usually work, since it's presumed that most people who were introduced to the MediaWiki software through Wikia will probably prefer seeing links always shiny and bright. But back to what I was saying--the issue isn't visual, it's that that level of stuff is information overload, insanely distracting and affects my reading. Again, the key phrase here is "my reading". I'm afraid this is a peccadillo of yours. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are no records in the almost 9 year history of this wiki of any user being affected so badly by our linking practices to call them "insanely distracting". If that link for holiday wasn't redlinked but blue linked I'd probably go to the article. And there would be nothing at that article that would give me any sense of anything related to the episode. Again the notion that a link must be directly related to the page on which the link is found is something that exists at Wikipedia. It is not our policy. As laid out at the T:LINKS series of guidelines, the basic policy is to create blue-links where it is possible to do so—not just where you think it is relevant to do so.

Now there are are a few common-sense exceptions that maybe aren't explicit in the rules:
 * Beware s. Don't link to polish if you mean Polish.  There are a surprising number of these in the DWU, mainly because some alien races are named after wholly ordinary things.  For instance, last week we were introduced to the Vigil, which shouldn't be confused with an ordinary vigil—but that gets us into questions of dab terms and naming conventions.  Suffice to say, there are hundreds of ordinary nouns which have a different meaning in the DWU by the transposition of a single capital letter.
 * Avoid s. Don't link to the fish bass if you mean the tonal pitch bass.  And in particular, remember that links should be to nouns, or at least variants derived from the nouns.  I suppose it's okay to have regenerate as a redirect to regeneration, but the verb form of concert should never be linked to a page on the noun concert.

Now, you may have thought it insulting to go through a basic English lesson, and I certainly didn't mean to cause offence. But I did want to point out with specificity that, yes, there is a reasonable case for relevancy guiding linking choices. However, that case is purely grammatical. It's nothing to do with clicking through on a link and being disappointed that it doesn't amplify your understanding of the page you came from. I'm as fond as the next person of clicking through endlessly, until I have a backlog of a 100 tabs (slight exaggeration)… I would strongly urge you to return to browser defaults while on our site. Having a new tab or a new window open for every link click is a non-standard setup, and it would indeed drive a person round the bend. You're already causing problems for yourself, technically, on the site by being so far back with your browser. And while I have more sympathy for that situation than probably anyone else on this site, I can't have any sympathy for someone who has their browser set to open a new instance on every click.

The other piece of advice I'd give is to skim articles in their entirety first and then click on the links. That way, you won't feel quite so much like you're jumping all around in a disjointed fashion. You'd be able to finish one though and then move on to the next. ..but there are some things it just doesn't make sense to link. Again, what we consider "sensible" is apparently different than you. To us, the main provision for reducing links can be found at T:OVER-WIKIFY. We reduce the number of links in an article not because of our individual perception of relevancy to understanding the present article. Rather, the main reason for reducing links is because of how we define "over-wikification": the repeated linkage of the same word throughout an article. Yes, as described above, if the wrong word, or sense of the word, is linked, then we should de-link it. But that's about the only "relevancy reason" that applies. I guess what I'm really asking about is editorial discretion. If a link fits the basic requirements of not having been linked earlier in the article, and can be an article, MUST it be linked? Yes. To be more specific, say that there was a Holiday article, which I think I'd rather like btw. I wouldn't link to it from The Bells of Saint John article because there is no earthly reason to. There is an earthly reason to. T:LINKS. In other words, it's policy, and we're bound to follow it. Again, it's not really up to us to decide whether something is "relevant", except in the grammatical sense. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding the editing process (and correct me if I am), it's ok to un-link blue links if they're irrelevant, silly, or in some way not-a-good-link. You are misunderstanding. And I've been trying to correct you, but it doesn't seem to be taking, if you'll forgive the observation. Delinking is highly discouraged, except as set forth earlier in this post. There's such a thing as editorial discretion right? I assume so, that's kinda what editing is about. Disagreements and discussions take place on the talk page of course, but each editor has their own editorial discretion. You don't have the discretion to blatantly defy policy, no. You can't go off on a campaign of linking only when relevant to the particular article you're working on when the policy is that you should link to all nouns that have existing articles and any nouns that logically could qualify for an article. I'm wondering if I have the same discretion when it comes to redlinks. There's a clear difference between de-redlinking and de-bluelinking: de-redlinking could remove an entry from Special:WantedPages. Is there any other difference? Is there a higher standard for un-redlinking than there is un-bluelinking? If there is, what is it? Making sure that it's still a wanted page? Something else? T:RED is actually very clear on all this.
 * Some editors misunderstand the utility of redlinks … and try to delink them. Don't do this.  Redlinks are good.  The should be kept unless the term has zero relevance to this wiki.

The threshold of relevance is "to this wiki", not "to the article on which an editor is currently working". If you cannot demonstrate that the redlink has little value to the wiki—that is, that it will not likely result in an article—then you can't de-link it.

If by "a clear difference between de-redlinking and de-bluelinking" you mean exactly one difference, then sure: there is one clear difference between them. De-redlinking depopulates Special:WantedPages. But otherwise, they have a similarly negative effects on our ability to improve articles in that delinking either type depopulates the much more important Special:WhatLinksHere reports, and prevents any number of bot related processes from fully working.

Links are the very lifeblood of a wiki. Nothing could actually be more vandalistic than going through and pulling them out just because one rather arrogantly believes that one knows what's "relevant" and what's "silly". Without links — red and blue — there's literally no point to having a wiki.