Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/Californium/archive1

Link maintenance
For those who are interested, the history of how the wrong Thompson and Street came to be linked here.


 * Stanley Thompson article created (3 October 2006)
 * Kenneth Street article created (15 May 2006)
 * Names red-linked in Californium article (9 July 2006)
 * Links removed by vandal (7 October 2008)
 * Links restored (1 May 2009)
 * Links removed (17 December 2009)
 * Links restored (16 March 2010)
 * Names linked incorrectly (3 July 2010)
 * Piping middle initial (3 July 2010)

Ironic really. An IP was in the midst of a series of angry edits, complaining at length in edit summaries about various matters of style and presentation, and in the midst of all that, they changed the red links to blue links without checking what articles they were linking to, but found time to pipe Stanley G. Thompson over the link to Stanley Thompson. At least the links only lasted for 8 months, not 4-5 years. But actually, that IP introduced another subtle error, conflating the Savannah River Site with the High Flux Isotope Reactor: 3 July 2010. I'm tempted to suggest that all edits by that IP be carefully checked.

And for the record, the reason I looked up the creation dates of the articles in question is because in some cases this sort of thing happens when someone creates an article and as if by magic a series of red-links all over Wikipedia turn blue. Trouble is, this doesn't register on people's watchlists, so you either have to have everyone who creates an article carefully checking that previously existing red-links that now point to the new article are correct, or everyone clicking links to make sure they are correct. Some of the scripts help show up links that turn to disambiguation pages (which look blue to normal editors), but I've yet to find a script that tells you that a blue link was a red-link a few days ago and you should therefore check it (though some scripts do show how old the article behind the link is, which also works, I suppose). I call all this "link maintenance", but I'm not sure how much care Wikipedians in general devote to links or maintaining them. From what I've seen, some are very careful, others less so. I think what people don't realise is how easy it is for things like this to slip through unnoticed. Carcharoth (talk) 07:20, 6 March 2011 (UTC)