[mb-style] Wikipedia AR using urls with hash

[Brian Schweitzer]

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 7:53 PM, Olivier <viapanda at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there anything in the documentation discouraging the use of Wacky
>  urls pointing to in-page anchors?
>  eg: like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Bonham#In_The_City_.2B_In_The_Woods
>
>  If not, what do you think about their use?
>
>  IMHO, we should prevent their use (and state so in the docs), for the
>  following reasons:
>  * the anchors are highly likely to change (a lot more than the page
>  URL), making these a maintenance problem
>  * they are unusable for non-human consumers, finding themselves with
>  content essentially not matching the entity it's linked to
>  * it does change the meaning of the AR from "has a wikipedia page" to
>  "has some content in a wikipedia page"...

I would agree with all three observations, while adding this:

Theoretically - we don't currently enforce it, nor often do it - but
Wikipedia links ought to use the perma-links, just as we encourage for
links to MusicBrainz.  Just like technically these both are valid:
http://musicbrainz.org/show/release/?releaseid=692673
http://musicbrainz.org/release/a0ae2917-9336-4d15-abc9-874a16482c57.html
the presented, prefered "permanent" link is actually
http://musicbrainz.org/show/permlink.html?id=a0ae2917-9336-4d15-abc9-874a16482c57&type=release

Wikipedia is the same way.  While
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Bonham#In_The_City_.2B_In_The_Woods
works, it is quite unstable.  While
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Bonham also works, it too isn't
intended to be a permanent link.  The presented permanent link is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tracy_Bonham&oldid=196063903
- and only pages at Wikipedia, not anchors, are assigned such
permanent links.

So, my 2 cents: While we may not enforce that all Wikipedia links have
to use the permanent links, any link to Wikipedia should theoretically
be able to be switched to a permanent link.  As that is universally
not true of anchors within Wikipedia pages, I thus think they
universally ought to not be linked.

Brian