User talk:Vstephen B

A belated welcome!


Here's wishing you a belated welcome to Wikipedia, Vstephen B! I see that you've already been around a while and wanted to thank you for your contributions. Though you seem to have been successful in finding your way around, you may still benefit from following some of the links below, which help editors get the most out of Wikipedia:


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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Again, welcome! 47.227.95.73 (talk) 23:39, 11 April 2023 (UTC) 47.227.95.73 (talk) 23:39, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Excessive linking in general
Hi. I see that some of your recent contributions have been adding a lot of links. At least in some of the mathematics articles that I have looked at and am more familiar with, the amount of linking that has been added has sometimes been excessive and inappropriate in my opinion. I wanted to explain why I have reverted your edit to Hyperconnected space and Ultraconnected space in particular, taking that as an example to illustrate the general principles. (In the same edit that you did in these articles, some of the changes may have been ok, but they were lumped with this excessive linking, so I reverted the whole thing (sorry) to give the opportunity to discuss this issue in general.)

A good starting point is MOS:OVERLINK: A good question to ask yourself is whether reading the article you're about to link to would help someone understand the article you are linking from. and also [Note 2] from that paragraph: A 2015 study of log data found that "in the English Wikipedia, of all the 800,000 links added ... in February 2015, the majority (66%) were not clicked even a single time in March 2015, and among the rest most links were clicked only very rarely", and that "simply adding more links does not increase the overall number of clicks taken from a page. Instead, links compete with each other for user attention."

More specifically for mathematics, more advanced concepts build upon more basic concepts. Each article lives within a certain context and each article is assuming a particular level of understanding from its readers, and as readers progress in their understanding, they become better able to grasp more advanced articles. Each article has a specific audience level and can have links to other articles that are at the same level or one level down if can describe it that way, but adding links to the extreme bottom level of the conceptual hierarchy is not helpful.

To illustrate with an example, somebody looking at Hyperconnected space and Ultraconnected space, which are concepts of topology, may need a link to topological space, and there is a link to that. Perfect. But if someone has no clue what a topology is, they have no point trying to understand the notion of "hyperconnected space"; they should first study topological spaces in general. In other words, people who don't know anything about topology are not part of the audience for the article "hyperconnected space". On the other hand, people who know about topology necessarily know about sets and subsets in general and their basic manipulation, as these are some of the fundamental concepts used to describe even the most basic notions of topology. Therefore adding a link to "empty set" or to "union of sets" or to "intersection", or similarly to "function", etc, etc, etc, is unnecessary. It can even be considered counterproductive, as it clutters the article and dilutes its focus. (And on the other hand, adding a link to "set" and "subset" in the topological space article would be perfectly appropriate there, as the target audience is different.)

In other words, following the guideline and the quote above from MOS:OVERLINK, for every single link we want to add we should ask ourselves if the new link is going to help for the target audience of the article specifically.

Also, separately from this issue of overlinking, there is something very useful called the "pipe trick", see Help:Pipe_trick and Help:Link that is worth familiarizing oneself with. In particular, if there is text in parentheses at the end of a target, it will automatically be removed from the display when using the pipe trick. So instead of, use   with a single pipe before the closing brackets. This is extremely useful and is actually the reason why many article titles that need disambiguation end with a qualifier in parentheses. Hope that helps.

Please let me know what you think.

Regards PatrickR2 (talk) 04:57, 28 September 2023 (UTC)