Talk:Wilsontown, Morningside and Coltness Railway

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Scotland

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Links

Someone marked the page as defective, requiring additional links. They are 100% entitled to do that, but I take this opportunity to put my side of the matter. Obviously this is my point of view only, and anyone is at liberty to disagree with me.

1) Marking that on the Article page and not on the Talk page seems to me to be unhelpful; it casts doubt on the reliability of the page in the mind of a visiting reader who only looks at the Article page, without enabling discussion of the issue here. I would prefer such comments to be made here first.

2) On some pages, you see a lot of overlinking. See wp:overlinking. It is better to avoid too many links in the intro section, as at this stage the reader is trying to decide whether the page is right for him, and links, which invite him to look at another page altogether, are distracting.

3) Continuing on the theme of overlinking, some people link from almost any noun in the article; I have seen "Scotland" linked, and "pound (currency)", and "coal" and so on. It is unlikely that someone coming to a specific topic on a named railway would see the link for Scotland and jump away to find out where Scotland is, what its history involved, etc.

4) I prefer only to link to any specific other article once, except in a long article where a reader may have skipped higher sections and might have jumped to a detailed part without reading a general introduction.

5) I think red links should be avoided unless there is a definite intention to write the missing linked-to article fairly soon.

As I said, these are only my views (although I believe them to be consisting with Wikipedia policy on linking); anyone who sees matters differently is welcome to say so here ... Afterbrunel (talk) 10:43, 29 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]