[mb-style] Wikipedia AR using urls with hash

[Paul C. Bryan]

The consensus seems this far that we should not link to anchors within
pages.

To best understand this, I guess my only question I have is, what
balance are we trying to strike between preventing link rot and
providing useful information?

As I mentioned in the edit that started this, sometimes a topic in
Wikipedia is not considered non-trivial enough to warrant its own page,
with attempts to create a separate topic resulting in a deletion.

I was on the fence on this one, and don't really feel strongly one way
or the other. Whatever information you can provide though to help
editors make better decisions in the future will help.

Paul

On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 11:20 +0100, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
> This disussion is pretty lame and I think we all agree anyway: we
> don't want to link albums to wikipedia:Artist#Album. If it doesn't
> have a Wikipedia page of its own just don't link it (add an annotation
> if you must). Unless someone is actually of the opinion that we should
> there's no need to discuss the details of document fragments or
> permalinks.
> 
> We do get carried away on this list...
> 
> Philip
> 
> On 3/9/08, Brian Schweitzer <brian.brianschweitzer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 3:57 AM, Bogdan Butnaru <bogdanb at gmail.com> wrote:
> >  > On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 4:11 AM, Brian Schweitzer
> >  >  <brian.brianschweitzer at gmail.com> wrote:
> >  >  >  I'm very aware what fragments are, and how they work, though I wasn't
> >  >  >  aware that the CGI-parser behind Wikipedia's permalink system
> >  >  >  maintained fragment support.
> >  >
> >  >  I'm not sure you do understand it completely. Wikipedia's CGI doesn't
> >  >  need to understand fragments, in fact it doesn't receive it normally.
> >  >  When a browser wants something like
> >  >  "http://some.uri/some/resource#fragment", it sends the server just the
> >  >  address "http://some.uri/some/resource", without the "#fragment" part,
> >  >  it receives the complete page, and then the browser scrolls down to
> >  >  the specified fragment (or a similar operation).
> >
> >
> > I'm not quite sure why this thread keeps harking back to my personal
> >  understanding of page fragments, rather than the actual topic, but
> >  that assumes the anchors the browser is looking for are maintained
> >  within the page being returned by the server (it would be quite
> >  possible, for example, that fragment identifiers within archived
> >  documents be minified and renamed to save on storage space - as I have
> >  seen archive.org do on several occasions, though I've never had cause
> >  to check whether Wikipedia did it).
> >
> >  In any case, if I can again try to reference back to the original
> >  question here: Should a url for Wikipedia (or indeed, any url AR) be
> >  permitted if it is using anchors?
> >
> >  As I see it, it raises two questions:
> >  1) Should we be linking to pages or to text within pages?  ie: Should
> >  we be linking if the entire page doesn't concern the
> >  release/artist/whatever?
> >  2) If we are to decide to link to text within pages, how should that
> >  link then be done?  Say what you will, but a link to a fragment
> >  identifier within a live page seems to me a bad idea, as it is quite
> >  easy that the linked fragment identifier be removed, even if the page
> >  it is a part of still exists - say an album being originally a subpart
> >  of an artist page, then later being moved to its own page.
> >
> >  It's worth considering Tim Berners-Lee's suggestions on such links
> >  (http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Fragment.html ):
> >  * A bookmark to the whole living document, or
> >  * A bookmark to a specific part of a "dead" version;
> >  * Intermediate combinations (I'm not really sure quite what he saw
> >  this as actually being)
> >
> >  If the link pertained to the entire page, we'd just be linking to the
> >  entire page, and not just the fragment within, so the first is out.
> >  That leaves us with:
> >  1) Don't link anchors
> >  2) Link live anchors
> >  3) Link anchors, but only to permalinked pages
> >
> >  Personally, I tend to think 1 the best option, followed by 3 as second
> >  best (since we Oliver has shown that Wikipedia doesn't break fragment
> >  identifiers in permalinked versions), with 2 imho just a bad idea.  It
> >  doesn't really matter if fragment identifiers still work in
> >  permalinked versions, or how well/poorly I personally understand how
> >  they work - noone has yet to address the point that such live anchor
> >  links are much less stable when compared with full pages (live or
> >  permalinked).
> >
> >
> >  Brian
> >
> >
> >  _______________________________________________
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> >
> 
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