User:Geo Swan/Because redirection to subsection heading is deeply broken

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Redirection to subsection heading is deeply broken
Today a participant in an afd asked me a question I have answered at least a dozen times before.

The nominator suggested that the article they nominated for deletion could be merged to a subsection of another (unnamed) article, and its entry in the disambiguation page could be amended to point to the subsection heading of of the (unnamed) target article.

Some of the most powerful features of wikis go unappreciated
The power of the wikipedia, and other similar projects, is not solely due to the efforts of its volunteers.


 * 1) The wikipedia's links are bidirectional. Any reader can instantly and reliably determine, with trivial effort, which other articles link to this article.  This is absolutely not true of the garden variety world wide web.
 * 2) Links continue to work even when article's names are changed.

Wikimedia software does not really support links to subsection headings
Ideally, if there was a revolution in how wikis stored information, so links could have a more precise granularity, this would not be a problem. But the wikimedia software, is built on top of traditional file systems. Our articles are traditional files, in a traditional file system.

One consequence of this is that the granularity of wikilinks is at the article level. If someone changes a subsection heading, even just a trivial spelling error, then all the links to that subsection heading break, silently, and without warning.

We have no mechanism for authors to check see what links point to a subsection heading. Further, what I have seen with some poorly advised merges is that sometime after a perfectly fine small article, that could stand on its own, was merged into a larger omnibus article, is that some time later, someone who was unaware of the merge discussion, looked at the material added because of the merge, decided it didn't really fit in that article, and removed it.

Even if some good faith contributor moves the material to a different section the link to a subsection heading breaks.

If some topic is worthy of a wikilink, then it is worthy of a distinct article
I suggest that if some topic is worthy of a wikilink, then it is worthy of a distinct article. Why do we link to a topic from an article? Because readers might want to know more about that topic. There is really no advantage, other than a misplaced aesthetic satisfaction, in shoehorning multiple topics into larger articles.

IMO, the use of Omnibus articles should be deprecated
IMO, the use of Omnibus articles should be deprecated.

The "what links here" button is extremely useful, and it is a feature which is seriously under-used. When one goes to an article, and find it does not really contain the information one was looking for a good next step is to click on the "what links here" button. Maybe the articles that link to the current article contain the information we want? Or maybe they link to another article that contains the information we want?

Unfortunately, the value of looking at the list of articles that link to the current article erodes as articles get bloated with multiple distinct topics.

So long as the granularity of the wikilinks supported by the wikimedia software is on the article to article level, then linking works best if articles stay small and focussed and only address a single topic. Yes, a role for larger articles remains, articles that cover broad topics -- but they should have lots of links to more focussed articles, that contain most of the detailed information.

Following a link is faster than searching within an article
It seems to me that those who favor merging related articles, merely because they are related, are artificially and unnecessarily confining themselves, and everyone else, to the inherent limits of paper documents.

Paper documents are inherently linear. Word follows word. Sentence follows sentence. Paragraph follows paragraph. And chapter follows chapter. There are crude stop-gap techniques used in paper documents to step outside of the linear limits of paper: footnotes; brief parenthesized sections; photo captions; brief sidebars.

Nevertheless, paper documents remain essentially linear. And this is a limit we can abandon in a wiki.

In my opinion when we merge an article into a larger article we make it harder for readers to find the information that was previously in the smaller article. Sure, we can use the cursor motion keys to look within, and article, or use our browsers' search features. But doing so is error-prone, is not guaranteed to find what we want, and is time consuming.

Some articles contain internal links -- links to other subsections within that article. IMO the use of this techique should be deprecated as well. This technique shares some of the same weaknesses as links to subsections of other articles. If a topic is worth linking to, it probably merits a distinct article.

Well, that is my first draft at a mini-essay on this topic.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 09:34, 8 September 2008 (UTC)