Wikipedia:Avoid using wikilinks

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Wikilinks allow an article to be pointed to by enclosing the article's title in square brackets. This allows the editor to link to another article without having to type in the URL of the article or enclose it in HTML anchor tags.

This page is an attempt to gather information supporting the assertion that wikilinks are harmful to Wikipedia. Convenience is often cited as the reason for using wikilinks. Certainly, it offers a useful shortcut to creating links and allows the links to point to the same article regardless of article moves. This helps to tie many articles of similar interest together.

Why wikilinks are considered harmful

• All those blue words are confusing. It makes the reader think, "What should I do with this? Click? Or just view and appreciate the simplicity of this tranquil blue text floating in a sea of black?" Making users think this poetically is harmful and may cause overheating.
• Wikilinks put a severe strain on the servers.
• Heavily wikilinked texts resemble spaghetti code.
• The links must be changed by the server from their "article name" variant into their HTTP address to render for the viewer every time the page is saved.
• If a link points to a page that does not exist yet, the link must be made to look red
• Every time a page is moved, all the wikilinks that incorrectly point to the old site will now point to a redirect, making the servers pull up two pages in a row.
• All of these actions waste valuable server resources.
• Wikipedia users never need links anyway. That is what the search bar was invented for.
  • And all of that scrolling is good for their fingers.

General concerns regarding wikilinks

• There is a growing concern regarding what should be wikilinked and why. For instance, in the phrase "Immanuel Kant is considered the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment.", should wikilinks be added to "Immanuel Kant", "philosopher" or the word "of"? All of these wikilinks would prove to be useful. The issue is almost as important as the ongoing debate regarding userboxes.
• The word wikilink increases the number of words starting with wiki- and this is starting to become annoying.

Alternatives

1. Replace all wikilinks with HTTP links - For instance, a link to the main page would normally be entered by typing [[Wikipedia:Main Page]]. In the future this link will be typed in manually by copying and pasting from the address bar, like so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
2. Replace all wikilinks with plain text equivalents - If someone wants to link to the main page, for instance, they can simply type Wikipedia:Main_Page. The user can figure out that he/she needs to copy and paste the article title into the address bar in order to visit that particular page. If you only want an abbreviated article title to be visible, you can reference the article by writing the abbreviated title with the actual title in parentheses: Main Page (Wikipedia:Main_page) Of course, this means that when a page is moved, one must search the entire wikipedia for links to the old page, and replace them manually with links to the new page, which probably defeats the purpose of using wikilinks in the first place.

See also

• Wikipedia:Avoid using preview button