Talk:Communes of the Lot département

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do we really need a redlink for EVERY one of these in the english version? please feel free to create these articles and then link them in.

BigFatDave 04:16, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

We DO need them. I am restoring the former version of the page. olivier 08:02, July 18, 2005 (UTC)

Please explain what those redlinks benefit. It looks like a long list of communes that have no articles yet. What good does that do anyone? I stumbled onto your list from the Pern page, and all I saw was a redlink farm. So why not make them links as articles are created? BigFatDave 04:12, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Why don't you remove all red links from Wikipedia and make them links as articles are created? olivier 08:05, July 19, 2005 (UTC)

These red links serve in fact several purposes. They are useful for the "what links here function". For instance, it is common to see "Mr. XYZ was born in xyz". Using the "what links here function" will be useful to identify the potential candidates for "xyz" (usually xyz is the name of several places) and write a related article about the birthplace of Mr. XYZ. In many cases, they are also the only occurence of the name of the town in Wikipedia. As a matter of fact, most such articles are created by anonymous users, who may have an incentive to create an article because the link already exists. Should they first have to create the link in order to write an article, they would probably not bother, and less such articles would be created. Also, you will notice that several of these red links are in fact disambiguated. This disambiguation work is part of an ongoing process of identifying the need for disambiguation pages, and therefore again increase the willingness to create town related articles. Hope this helps. olivier 08:47, July 19, 2005 (UTC)