Wikipedia:WikiProject Newspapers/Links in footnotes

Per several discussions, Pete Forsyth is planning to semi-automatically (using AWB) add wikilinks to articles about newspapers in the footnotes of articles about Oregon politicians. This work will take place in 2021 (roughly March to September) and is intended to facilitate discussion of adopting this practice more widely (i.e., in a broader set of Wikipedia articles, and/or for a broader collection of sources.)

See past discussions here:

On this page, I will draft the regular expressions to be used in this process, etc. I welcome feedback and input throughout the process, and am happy to course-correct as needed.

Problems to sort out prior to implementation

How to best eliminate cases where the link already exists? (Should be fairly easy to distinguish, e.g., work=Oregon Historical Quarterly from work=[[Oregon Historical Quarterly]], but what about cases where a footnote template is not used?)
As Lord Bolingbroke pointed out, it's worthwhile to use redirects in meaningful cases, e.g. The Morning Oregonian and The Sunday Oregonian. But what about variants, such as Morning Oregonian and Sunday Oregonian? Seems worthwhile to identify one variant for common cases like this, and stick to it.

Regular expressions to be used

Just playing with ideas here. I'm not super expert with RegEx, and I welcome feedback. I'll of course be testing this carefully before running it, and looking closely at the results prior to saving each result.

\<ref(.*)Oregon Historical Quarterly(.*)\<\/ref\>
$1Oregon Historical Quarterly$2

\<ref(.*)The Oregonian(.*)\<\/ref\>
$1The Oregonian$2

\<ref(.*)The Morning Oregonian(.*)\<\/ref\>
$1The Morning Oregonian$2

\<ref(.*)Oregonlive(.*)\<\/ref\>
$1Oregonlive$2

\<ref(.*)OregonLive.com(.*)\<\/ref\>
$1OregonLive.com$2

\<ref(.*)Oregon Live(.*)\<\/ref\>
$1Oregon Live$2

\<ref(.*)Portland Oregonian(.*)\<\/ref\>
$1Portland Oregonian$2

\<ref(.*)The Sunday Oregonian(.*)\<\/ref\>
$1The Sunday Oregonian$2

Bad idea

• One of the worst ideas I've ever seen. What earthly purpose would it serve? It would simply present a link that would not further the purpose of a footnote which is to tell the reader where the info came from and to provide a link to that source, if one exists. This should be shot down and buried where it falls. Thank you nevertheless for taking the time to present something that makes sense to you. Sincerely, BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 06:25, 11 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]