Wikipedia:Overlink crisis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it. |
This essay addresses the overlink crisis and problems of overlinking Wikipedia pages with excessive wikilinks, especially in navboxes or infoboxes. For instructions on reducing or de-linking navboxes, see below: Convert large navboxes to navpage-link.
|
The issue of overlinking in Wikipedia pages (or other hyperlinked text) is the characteristic of having too many internal wikilinks or hyperlinks to external webpages.[1]
[edit] Aspects of overlinking
There are some typical cases of overlinking.[1][2] It is characterized by:
- a large proportion of the words in each sentence being rendered as links;
- using links that have little related content, such as linking on specific years like 1995, or unnecessary linking of common words used in the common way, for which the reader can be expected to understand the word's full meaning in context, without any hyperlink help;
- A link for any single term (other than for date formats) is excessively repeated in the same article. "Excessive" is usually more than one link for the same term in a line or a short paragraph, since in this case one or more duplicate links will almost certainly then appear needlessly on the viewer's screen.
[edit] Overlink crisis
During 2007, many thousands of articles were modified to use various navigation-boxes (navboxes) or infobox templates to link to related sets of other articles. However, the usage expanded:
- the links in navboxes were gradually increased to link 100, 200, 500 (or more) articles, in each of thousands of other articles; and
- multiple navboxes were placed on almost any article remotely related to the subject.
[edit] Boxifying articles
Rather than limiting a navbox to the major related topics, some navboxes have become the condensed key contents of an entire article, in a "boxified form" to be appended to another article. Such navboxes are the total opposite of the wikilink concept: details should be kept separate by linking to another article via a single wikilink, rather than repeating portions of that article, again, in the current article. The notion of repeating all major aspects of another article in the boxed form as navbox contents is contrary to the wikilink concept. For example, mentioning that a singer often performed in a famous concert hall requires just one link to that singer's name, not an entire navbox linking that singer's albums, singles, co-singers, songwriters, tours, and TV specials.
[edit] Solution: avoid or limit navboxes/infoboxes
The greatest source of overlinking is in large navboxes or infoboxes used in hundreds of thousands of articles. There are several general ways to limit the impact of those boxes:
- If possible avoid using navboxes, completely, in articles that are only remotely related to the topic.
- Link just a few related pages as see-also links.
- Use a set of smaller navboxes to cover a topic, and only link to each smaller navbox where directly related, such as cities or counties, but rarely linking both.
- Emphasize that any major overall navbox should be kept limited in size, to perhaps no more than 200 total wikilinks, recommending smaller navboxes to link specialized sub-topics, not all joined into a single massive navbox.
- Remove common-word links from navboxes or infoboxes: avoid linking "city" or "county" or "km" or other common words. Readers can type "km" and look it up.
[edit] Convert large navboxes to navpage-link
- The quickest way to reduce Wikipedia overlinks will be patching each large navbox template to display a one-line navbox with a navpage-link. Unfortunately, show/hide options don't suppress actual page-links. Instead, convert each navbox template to show a one-line navbox with a navpage-link, by adding 5 lines of template coding as a truncated, include-only naxbox. Then, tag the original navbox code with "noinclude" to suppress all the detailed wikilinks, so the new one-line navbox sits atop the suppressed original navbox. Small navboxes should not be changed.
- Add 5 lines to the top of each large navbox template:
<includeonly>
{{navbox
| name = XXX
| title = [[XXX]] [[Template:XXXnavbox|[full navpage] ]]
}}</includeonly><noinclude>
- The "XXX" refers to the specific name or title of the navbox.
- Near the bottom of the navbox template, put a 6th line "</noinclude>" to indicate skipping all those prior wikilinks when the navbox is appended onto an article page. Only a one-line navbox will then appear, in each affected article, showing the option for "[full navpage]" to display the full navpage.
- Any wikilinks inside a template, but not displayed, will not be propagated into the Wikipedia page-link database(s). For example, the boxified Google navbox can be accessed as a one-line box:
|
||
If a navbox formerly displayed 120 wikilinks, when used in 120 articles, then 120*120= 14,400 wikilinks will be dropped, a few minutes after the template is saved, when Wikipedia updates the page-link database(s) for articles back-linked to that saved template. The update is not seen by users, so few readers are aware of the millions of overlinked page-links.
Those are some major ways to limit the growing overlink crisis.
[edit] Navbox versus navpage
Although editors generally try to keep navboxes focused on the most general articles about a topic, a navbox often strays off-topic and gets expanded into over 100 wikilinks. Trying to limit navboxes has often been a slippery slope, and many navboxes have slipped into expanded topics, with each navbox containing more than 100 wikilinks. A large navbox would be better as an entire navpage (rather than just a navbox) with more space to address, perhaps, 200-300 equally important subtopics. A common example would be the 254 counties of Texas, which had been included in a massive Texas navbox template, but were placed instead as 254 wikilinks on separate navpage "Template:Texas_counties" and set an important precedent for a standalone navigation-page. The Texas-counties navpage alone avoided 254*900= 228,600 wikilinks in the first 900 articles about Texas towns. Rather than dragging a large navbox along the bottom of each article, the navpage provides a central menu into subtopics, by a right-click opening into a new window or by browser-backing to the prior navpage display.
[edit] Why a crisis exists
There is no technical difficulty or potential performance problem with overlinking. Each link takes up a couple of bytes of wikitext in the article storage itself, plus a couple dozen bytes to record the link in the database. While the number of links may increase quadratically with the number of articles, this is negligible compared to other factors ― the number of revisions increases more or less exponentially with the number of articles, for instance (see Wikipedia:Modelling Wikipedia's growth#Edits per Article), and each revision takes up far more storage than a link. If anyone claims that there's some technical problem with having lots of links, please point them firmly toward Wikipedia:Don't worry about performance.
However, some users may find the information overload or clutter of too many wikilinks to be an aesthetic or usability problem.
[edit] References
- ^ a b PCMag.com Encyclopedia. PC Magazine. Retrieved on 2007-01-19.
- ^ Dvorak, John C.. "Missing Links", PC Magazine, April 2002.
