Wikipedia talk:Only make links that are relevant to the context/Archive 5

See also: Wikipedia talk:Quotations should not contain wikilinks

FYI: Quotations should not contain wikilinks proposal

A proposal relating to this policy has been created at Wikipedia:Quotations should not contain wikilinks, please discuss on that proposal's discussion page. Hollow are the Ori 23:38, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Links in quotations

It seems to me that links shouldn't be included in quotations unless they were in the original material (or are included in square brackets to indicate that they weren't in the original material). In particular, the example given "He" is a Bad Thing, as it's an Easter Egg link that doesn't serve to take the reader where she expects to go (in this case, to an explanation of the masculine third-person singular pronoun). --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 21:51, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

That is an interesting interpretation. I would never expect a link in an encyclopedia to take me to an explanation of a pronoun (especially not when floating my mouse over the link tells me even before I click on it that the link points to Winston Churchill). Using the mouseover feature of our links stuck me as a very clean way to eliminate ambiguity while being even less disruptive to the reader than the traditional brackets of print media. Rossami (talk) 03:11, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Thinking about it more, it seems that you are suggesting the that right format for the first example would be "The [[[Arctic fox|Arctic]]] fox is white". If so, I'm not sure how to make that work. Triple brackets show as straight text in wikicode. I guess we could plug in the html code for the outer single brackets but that seems very cumbersome.

First, there was a long discussion on the Wikipedia talk:Quotations should not contain wikilinks that had not come to consensus. In the interest of trying to not be a jerk, I did not completely delete the added items, but left in what I thought people had actually agreed to.

Second, I agree completely with Mel Etitis above that the example of [[Winston Churchill|He]] is antithetical to the purpose of wikilinks. Wikilinks are not footnotes. They are not a little game where you mouse over them to find information important to the content of the article. They are merely links to other articles for the convenience of the reader.

Third, there is absolutely no basis for including original hyperlinks in quoted text, just as you would not be required to include original footnotes in quoted text. Neither hyperlinks nor footnotes are part of the text, they are additional information that the author purposely included separately from the actual text.

Finally, it is not a quoters job to divine the original intent of a quoted person in order to determine whether or not a wikilink should apply. Wikilinks should be used where they would be useful to a reader, not merely where a quoted person would approve. Chuck 05:58, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

I think it's fine if the wikitext doesn't match the link as long as the target is obvious. For example, if an article says "His son would later slaughter many more chickens", and has not yet mentioned his son's name, then it's more appropriate to rephrase as "His son, George Bush, would later slaughter many more chickens." I think this is why surprise links are so rarely useful: because if it is obvious, you've probably already mentioned it, and in that case normally you would have linked it the first time you mentioned it. Deco 06:32, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

It's not a question of whether or not the wikitext matches the link. It's whether the wikilink explicitly changes the information provided. In the example I deleted, the only way you would know who "He" was is by following the wikilink (or mousing over it) to find out that "he" was Winston Churchill. This means that the article would be unintelligible if printed out. Chuck 08:12, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, was responding to original poster. I agree with everything you said. Deco 11:37, 8 June 2006 (UTC)