Michael Peel wrote: >> There does seem to be a possibility for a bit of lateral thinking here. >> If, say, the current external links and interwiki sections were done by >> transclusion from something separately maintained (a set of pages >> organised by both language and topic?), how could that be implemented, >> and how could it relate to efforts to make hard-copy bibliography more >> modular? > > That sounds like a way of adding confusion to those editing a page, > when they find that part of the page is stored somewhere else > completely. Interwiki (as in language) links seem to be dealt with > well nowadays by robots; expanding that to include wikisource links > might be good. External links are best done as project-specific ones > IMO, though. Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of the undivided editing box and simplicity. I'm not also not really cut out to be a strategy wonk - too much to do right now, at least. But the "second decade" of WP is only around nine months off, and I hear various ideas circulating. Some of what is "up in the air" may be the future.
If I start thinking about the data structure that would support a bot putting in language interwiki links, it seems that (although it might be a bit untidy in practical terms) it is close to being something with interesting potential. If it wasn't private to a bot, but a WMF project in itself: wouldn't it provide a focus for all sorts of metadata collection, as well as collection of a web directory (Wikipedia doesn't do that, but it could happen elsewhere), bibliographical data, no doubt other things? Magnus Manske talks to me about such things every time we meet. We have got close to a standard "footer" organisation for WP pages (such as Works/See also/References/Further reading/External links/Attribution/Categories/Interwiki). It would take a bit of thinking of matters the other way round, but having other "views" possible in which the main body of the article was presented with a footer according to some preference options, only References being standard, sounds fairly interesting to me. This thread started really because WP:EL seems now to want external links to be minimal, driving people to place relevant links in References (for which they'd have to develop the article to justify the link). I understand where that kind of thinking comes from, but all stick and no carrot makes Jack a dull boy. Hence my interest in other options. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
