Ahem. When you lower-case "External Links", this often leads to inconsistency within the article (other headers have initial caps), which I believe is a graver sin. Nelson Ricardo 11:00, Jul 8, 2004 (UTC)
- But the Manual of Style says that the headers are not supposed to have initial caps to begin with! - Fennec (はさばくのきつね) 11:03, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- Hi, Fennec. Manuals and conventions are suggestions, not the law. Anyway, if the user insists on correcting one header in an article, all headers within the article should be corrected. It's worse to be inconsistent within an article, rather than across articles. Nelson Ricardo 11:13, Jul 8, 2004 (UTC)
- The method I was using to do these initially did result in a lot of inconsistencies. However, I now check all sections in the article (or try to—it's possible I miss a few) and correct them all if required. —Kate | Talk 17:43, 2004 Jul 8 (UTC)
Could you please change your script to remove the spaces before and after "External link(s)" and any empty lines just below it? Can your script count the number of links to decide on "link" or "links"? Thanks. -- Jeandré, 2004-07-11t10:00z
- The actual corrections are done by hand rather than by a script (the script only generates the list itself). I normally try to remove blank lines below the heading, but that may end up having to be done as a separate process for all headers—there are a lot of those. For whitespace around the header ("
== External links =="), does that make a difference to the way it's laid out? —Kate | Talk 10:16, 2004 Jul 11 (UTC)
- Thanks for doing this. Layout not affected, but when I find extra whitespace in section headers I remove it - it may be only a few bytes per article, but it adds up if you export all the articles (sans history). I also remove the typewriter's 2 spaces between sentences, but for a different reason. -- Jeandré, 2004-07-11t19:31z
I see what you're trying to do, but is there any real need? It seems like a lot of effort to little end. Is there no way in which a program could fix this for the whole database in one swoop? (ricjl 18:30, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC))
- There's no more need than there is for anything else to conform to the MoS, but consistency is generally a good thing. Some of it could be automated (often other headings are incorrect, and that can only be fixed by a person, or else the article has to be refactored to not end up as a mess), but we don't mind doing it by hand. Someone else is free to write a bot for it if they like. —Kate | Talk 18:42, 2004 Aug 2 (UTC)
Kate, excellent work. Is anyone working on a script that would be able to traverse the actual links and warn for broken external links (404 errors etc)? Nixdorf 04:59, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- In theory, yes. However, it's a significantly more time-consuming project, and not something I'm looking at doing in the near future. (One has to be sure that the link is really gone, and not just temporarily broken, for example...) However, if you would like a list of possibly broken links, I could look at doing that. It may take several years to check all the links though ;-) —Kate | Talk 04:57, 2004 Aug 4 (UTC)
Thanks for the excellent work and going forward as I write new articles, I will do my best to ensure that these links are added within a section. Cheers.--Jpittman 02:35, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)
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