Friday, July 10, 2015

#Wikipedia - is it about articles or about information? II

Dear Wikipedians. Red links are good. They are an invitation to write more articles and, in them olden days, it was the main way to many, many more articles. The draw back for readers is that behind those articles there is nothing. As a result articles look unfinished and many Wikipedias removed the red links.

Enter, Red Links 1.1. Currently it is just a template and it should be properly embedded in MediaWiki. What it does is link to Wikidata and as a consequence it can do multiple things. It could provide you with an article in a language you can read. It could show you information in the Reasonator. In all cases it does provide an editor with data to base an article on.

We could even change the behaviour of normal links and allow for a "left click" on a link. This could provide a list of all the articles in other languages and a link to Reasonator. The beauty of such an innovation is that "disambiguation pages" become redundant because the disambiguation is in the link itself. When the Wikidata items is enriched with statements, it means that the subject may pop up in associated lists, in categories.

The beauty is that this is a winner for everyone. Readers get access to more information. Editors get access to more information to write new or improve articles. Wikidata becomes used for a task that it is ready for; link articles through links and red links.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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