Wikipedia talk:Date formatting and linking poll: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 08:38, 23 April 2009

Revision as of 23:59, 23 April 2009

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That would be a silly [[kludge]] which would turn off all autoformatted links, including the ones which do comply with the new [[WP:LINK#Chronological items]] guidelines, and wouldn't turn off any non-autoformatted link, including the seventeen occurrence of [[2007]] (without a day link) in the same section. --<span style="font-family: monospace; font-weight: 600; color: #00F; background-color: #FFF;">[[User:A. di M.|A. di M.]]</span> (formerly Army1987)<small>&nbsp;—&nbsp;''[[Special:Contributions/A. di M.|Deeds]],&nbsp;not&nbsp;[[User talk:A. di M.|words]]''.</small> 17:52, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

:I don't know that I'd call it a kludge so much as a stop-gap solution so auto formatting can be salvaged without keeping all the links intact. And from my perspective it's a reasonable compromise considering I want to keep all date links (the effect here is that I lose all the date links, but they can be manually added where appropriate). —[[User:Locke Cole|Locke Cole]] • [[User talk:Locke Cole|t]] • [[Special:Contributions/Locke Cole|c]] 19:21, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

== Article list ==

{{seealso|User talk:Ryan Postlethwaite#Article list}}

Apologies for the misuse of the {{tl|seealso}} template, but I think it's important to keep discussion as centralised as possible, or at least have links to where discussion has taken place.

I see that Ryan is suggesting that removal of date links should not be done by bot. I'd like to disagree with that opinion and give the reasons:

# In my humble estimation, there are millions of links within articles leading to date articles which are not germane to the subject and offer no value to the reader of the article. I submit that the community has clearly made its wishes known and that those links should be removed;

# In my humble estimation, there are no more than a handful of links within articles leading to date articles which are germane to the subject. So few, in fact, that they could be easily enumerated.

If I am correct, then a list of articles containing useful date links would be simple to compile. This could then be used as an exclusion list for any bot tasked with delinking dates. The "thought need[ed] to go into each and every one to decide whether that is important" (actually ''relevant'' is the correct adjective) would then all be done prior to a bot run. Manually delinking millions of dates is a complete waste of editors' time, when a bot could accomplish the identical task far more accurately and rapidly. The other advantage of making a page which lists exceptions is that the arguments about whether the articles [[12 February]] or [[1809]] are relevant to the article [[Charles Darwin]], etc. could be kept in one place and out of the article itself.

As I believe I'm right about the paucity of relevant links to date articles, I'll start by nominating an article that I believe contains a germane date link. If I'm wrong, then other editors should be able to list far more examples. I don't believe that can happen.

* Article [[MM]] contains a relevant link to date article [[2000]]

--[[User:RexxS|RexxS]] ([[User talk:RexxS|talk]]) 23:59, 23 April 2009 (UTC)