User:A. di M./Questions

Feel free to edit this page; I'm not attached to any particular wording for these questions.

Background questions

Question 1

Do you believe that, when deciding whether to make an internal link in an article, one should exclusively take in account the current state of the link target? Or should one also take in account whether the linked topic is potentially relevant to the article containing the link?

Arguments for the "current state" answer

Allowing more links can clutter the visual appearance of articles.

Readers who don't intend to edit can be frustrated when they follow a link which takes to a stub.

A link can always be added later if a potential link target article improves.

Arguments for the "potential" answer

Those links can take readers to currently underdeveloped articles which they might then decide to improve. It would be more difficult for potential editors to ever discover that these articles even exist, if they are orphaned.

Using the "What links here" feature, one can determine how often a particular stub is linked, and hence which articles it is more important to improve

When a stub improves, the usefulness of links to it will automatically increase, without the need of going to edit other articles to add new links

Question 2

Do you believe that the current form of most day-of-the-year and year articles—containing little more than lists of otherwise unrelated events, births and deaths—should continue to be used? Or should they be eventually be replaced by proper articles?

Arguments for "they should be replaced"

Long lists of events sharing nothing but their anniversaries violate WP:NOT#INDISCRIMINATE, and can be potentially confusing when they comprise events in different calendars (for example, both William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes died on 23 April, but Shakespeare actually died ten days later, as the Julian calendar was still in use in England)

The current form of day-of-the-year articles provides no useful information about a date which a reader coming there from another, although relevant, article could be interested in; for example, the article "December 25" could explain how the feasts of Sol invictus and of Yule were eventually replaced by Christmas Day; but currently these holidays are only mentioned in one-line entries of the "Holidays and observances" section of that article, after many screenfuls of irrelevant entries (such as "Turkish Cypriot Bayrak Radio begins transmitting in Cyprus after Turkish Cypriots were forcibly excluded from Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation": how many people remembered about that on 25 December of the following year?)

See User:A. di M./April 23 for an example of how a proper article about a day of the year could look like. The currently existing lists can be moved to sub-articles starting with "List of", or deleted altogether.

The current form of year articles includes events of zero historic significance, for example: La, la, la by Massiel (music and text by Manuel de la Calva and Ramón Arcusa) wins the Eurovision Song Contest 1968 for Spain (So what? Every year someone wins that contest), and necessarily exclude any event which did not happen on a particular day (just try to get from 2009 to Global financial crisis of 2008–2009...) This way, readers who come to a year article in order to have a historic perspective about a particular period cannot see the forest for the trees. On the other hand, a prose article could clearly explain the Zeitgeist of a particular historic period.

See 1346 for an example of a proper article about a year. 1929 has been improving recently too, although it still includes lists of births and deaths which could be moved to sub-articles.

Arguments for "they should remain as they are"

Articles about days of the year are used for the "On this day..." space on the Main Page

There are hundreds of articles about days of the year and thousands of articles about years; it would take a very long time to improve all of them.

Question 3

Do you believe that Wikipedia:Linking should specifically mention when to link and when not to link dates and years? Or is it sufficient that they be covered by the same rules which apply to all other links, namely:

Unless they are particularly relevant to the topic of the article, it is generally inappropriate to link:

• [...]
• terms whose meaning would be understood by almost all readers;
• items that would be familiar to most readers, such as [...], and dates.

In general, do create links to:

• relevant connections to the subject of another article that will help readers to understand the current article more fully (see the example below).

Since we used to link all full dates for autoformatting, a footnote could be added for a limited time period (e.g. 12 months) after the sentence ending with "dates" quoted above, reading, for example, It used to be recommended to link all dates containing both a month name and a day number in order to enable date preferences; this was deprecated in late 2008.