User:Jlwoodwa/Avoid piped links

The piped link is an iconic feature of wikitext, a substantial improvement over WikiWikiWeb's camel case links, and generally an essential part of any modern hypertext system. So why should they be avoided?

Problem
Most editors know to avoid the most egregious misuses of piped links, such as MOS:EGG. But the issues extend beyond this: fundamentally, piped links encourage ; at worst, there may be.

Another, lesser problem is that. It's better to write something once than twice.

Goal
A link is a navigational aid: the link target should not convey any additional information beyond the text, and the text should clearly indicate the target.

The best way to achieve this is with an unpiped link, but that can be difficult or impossible; even so, it's still possible to hold fast to this rule.

Tricks and templates
If something here applies, you can avoid piped links without substantially changing anything!
 * If you're just removing disambiguation from (or adding an affix to) the link text, use the pipe trick. (Yes, this is a piped link.) See  for  to remove the disambiguation.
 * If you're linking to a section, slink produces a link that's both clearer and prettier.
 * If the entire text is modified (e.g., with italics), then simply "switch the order" with the link.
 * If any link text is the link target, but instead serves to grammatically integrate the link into the surrounding text, then move it out of the link. (This shouldn't change the meaning of anything; if it does, then that was  bad style, for other reasons, and should of course be rephrased.)

Rephrase the text

 * If the target explains what the text, such as In 2007, Doe published his first book., move this explanation into the text; an unpiped link will then be appropriate (In 2007, Doe published his first book, titled Foobar.).
 * If the target and the text describe  concepts of their own, and the link expresses a  between the two, then the above may be appropriate; however, if the target isn't relevant to the surrounding text, see the next section.

Change the target
Suppose that you mention a concept, absent-mindedly linkify its first appearance, and then find that it's a redlink. Fortunately, the concept described in an existing article – either at a different name, or as a subtopic within a more general page. In that case, it is tempting to make a piped link from your concept to that page.

Tempting, but

What you do is:
 * 1) Link to your concept anyway,  a pipe, and using the most natural or obvious name for it.
 * 2) Click on the resulting redlink.
 * 3) Make it a redirect to whichever page (or section) you wanted to link to.

For example, if you wanted to reference the annexation of Texas, you might linkify the phrase "annexation of Texas". If this doesn't exist, but the page Texas annexation exist, then you have two options:
 * Rephrase your sentence to use the words "Texas annexation", and linkify them.
 * Linkify your unmodified phrase, and make "annexation of Texas" a redirect to "Texas annexation".

Redirects are good
Which world would you rather live in:
 * A world where everyone wants to link to Foo, finds that it doesn't exist, and makes a piped link to Bar instead.
 * A world where everyone wants to link to Foo, someone makes it a redirect to Bar, and then everyone just links to Foo.

Redirects make knowledge, instead of relying on everyone to know that a Foo is a kind of Bar, and to remember this each time they would have linked to Foo. They're also useful for anyone who directly searches for Foo.

Use a piped link anyway
Unfortunately, the pipe trick isn't a silver bullet. When disambiguation is complicated or contextual, it might not be sufficient. If you have this problem, then you are hereby granted permission to use a piped link – but only as a "smarter pipe trick" would.

Process

 * 1) Make an unpiped link, using every applicable strategy above.
 * 2) Preview the page and look at the displayed text.
 * 3) If any part of the link is  redundant or irrelevant, use a piped link and remove those parts from the text.
 * 4) If the resulting article text is ungrammatical or has poor style, and neither &sect; rephrasing the text nor &sect; changing the target has helped, then rewrite the link text to match its surroundings, but.
 * 5) * If you absolutely must, you can move information out of the link and into the surrounding text, so long as it remains clear that it applies to the link.

How do I know what's redundant or irrelevant?
In general, if the words in question are completely obvious given context (including the previous sentences and the article's subject), you can remove them from the link text.

For example, if an article about Internet harassment mentions Gamergate (harassment campaign), it's obviously referring to the harassment campaign; disambiguating it from the type of ant is unnecessary, so removing "(harassment campaign)" is justified. (Note that the pipe trick works fine here; this is just for demonstration.)

However, some redundancy can be beneficial: don't assume that everyone reading a sentence has read previous sentence in the article. You're to remove disambiguation, but not always encouraged, and certainly never required.

If you want to keep the disambiguation, but Wikipedia's standard parenthesis-based disambiguation style is hard to integrate into your writing, then disambiguate with prose,, and:
 * If the resulting link text would make sense as an article name, do use a piped link: instead,  by creating a redirect.
 * Otherwise, a piped link is acceptable.

Cross-disambiguation links
A more complicated situation is when two disambiguated articles with the same "main name" are relevant to each other. In that case, you might need to substantially modify the link name to avoid redundancy and maintain good style, but the golden rule still applies:.

Never write The film's screenplay was also published as a book.! This is wrong in multiple ways: See WP:OFTHESAMENAME.
 * 1) It's unclear whether this linked article is about this specific book or books in general.
 * 2) Less obviously, the link target  hold new information: that the book has the same title as the article's subject!