On 12 October 2011 06:56, Carcharoth <[email protected]> wrote:

> I agree absolutely that external links and further reading should be
> used far more than they are.


Nah.

As in yes, but there's an entire noticeboard on Wikipedia devoted entirely
to systematically stamping out external links, whether they're useful or
not.

Some of the members go from article to article removing ALL the links that
wouldn't get them permanently banned for removing.

One of the members of that board even decided that they should rewrite one
of the guidelines so that it said that links can only be kept if there's an
*overwhelming* majority that wants any particular link... and then in most
cases if there's an RFC they effectively canvas by posting notices on the
noticeboard to ensure that any majority isn't quite overwhelming enough in
their eyes (and single purpose account !votes count for them), and it looks
like they often edit war links away anyway afterwards, using sock puppets,
irrespective of the result.

Well, we don't necessarily know who the sock puppet is, but if the sock
puppet is reverted, members of the board frequently, publicly, revert the
revert.

It does help to organise very
> large external link sections into subsections, both to help readers
> (in finding what may be of interest) and the editors (in trimming
> where needed and organsing what is there).
>

That's the way it's supposed to work, but I've never seen an external links
section that big, because if it got a tenth that size it would be put up on
the noticeboard and then get gratuitously chopped. And I'm not talking about
spam links here.


> Carcharoth
>

-- 
-Ian Woollard
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