User:Mini-mitch/Sandbox Three/Wikification
Wikis are encyclopaedias — with a difference. Using a standard print encyclopaedia, a reader who encounters a word that baffles or intrigues her must physically turn to another page to find out more about that word. Indeed, it's possible she'll even have to bring out an entirely different volume from her library. With a wiki, we are able to wikify text, allowing the reader to be a click away from obtaining more information. At its most basic, wikifying a word means enclosing it in brackets, so as to create a link to another article. It's done like this:
[[glasses]]
To increase the utility of this wiki, every unique noun in an article that can be wikified should be wikified. By clear community consensus, there's no such thing as an article that's "too small" or "too insignificant". If a word appears in a narrative this wiki covers, an article about it is allowable.
Thus, when writing articles, you should never assume "there isn't an aritcle about that on this wiki". Test words by starting with two brackets and the first few letters of your word. The auto-suggest feature will pop up and reveal whether we have an article with that name. For instance, if you type:
[[gla
you'll get a ton of words beginning with "gla". Click on the word you want, and it's instantly wikified.
Should you find that an article does not yet exist, you are positively encouraged to create a redlink like this. Some people think of redlinks as ugly or pointless. In truth, they're requests — or, if you like, links to future articles. They say to readers, "We know we should have an article about this topic, but we don't, yet." When a redlink is created, it is added to the list at Special:WantedPages. This will then increase the chances that the page will be created, because some editors use WantedPages as a way to prioritise their work. The more redlinks that are created for a word, the higher up on the list it will go, further increasing the chances that it will be created.
If there should be an article about something, it is better to create a redlink for it than to not link it at all.
Don't over-wikify[[edit] | [edit source]]
That said, it is possible to "over-wikify". By way of long-standing forum consensus, it is recommended that you limit the number of times you wikify the same word in a single article. Generally, it is preferred that you link to only the first instance of a word in each section of an article. If the article is not sectionalised, but has large, multi-sentence paragraphs, then wikify the word once a paragraph. To give a practical example, we don't want the Doctor linked every single time we see it, but we do want it linked enough so that if we scroll down in an article we can still find the occasional link.
Self links forbidden[[edit] | [edit source]]
One type of link — the self link — should never be made. A self link is a link on the page of which the link is the object. For instance a self link on this page would be [[Tardis:Manual of Style]]. This kind of link is forbidden because it gets in the way of bot maintenance and it adds nothing of value to the page. Moreover, because it automatically creates bold text, it makes for an inconsistent appearance of that word or phrase on the page. If you want to embolden something, only use the wiki markup, '''Bold text'''.
Linking to a heading within the same article[[edit] | [edit source]]
A specialised type of self link is the "self heading link". These are allowed. Indeed, a self heading link can be very useful in some longer articles. They are formed by typing a pound/hash sign (#), followed by the section heading to which you want to link. For instance, the self heading link for this section is [[#Linking to a heading within the same article]].
Ordinary section links — those you make from another article — are made with a different, though related, syntax, which is explained below.
