>> About external links, the real question is: what is a good number of >> links to have at the end of an article? Everyone will surely agree >> that an article with 100 external links at the end is not ideal. What >> people want from Wikipedia is a site where others have sifted through >> the chaff to present the most relevant information. > > I would not agree. On an extremely complex topic, perhaps 100 links is > perfectly justifiable. Figure 5 sub-divisions, that's only 20 links a > piece. (No one looks at an article with 5 sections with 20 references > a piece and goes 'everyone will surely agree this is not ideal!') > Context is king, and you are immediately trying to make dangerous > generalizations. > > So tell me, what failure rate would you find acceptable? You > apparently are not disturbed at a >90% failure rate to use external > links; would you be disturbed at 95%? At 99%? Before trying to put me > onto a slippery slope, explain where on the original topic you would > finally agree, 'yes, this is too bad a failure rate, something must be > done'. Until you present some principled reason or specifics, you read > like a blind defense of the status quo.
As Kevin said, this is in no way a failure rate. An external link provided as a formatted inline citation to support or expand on the text of the article is very helpful to the reader. A huge list of external links at the end of the article is just "here's a bunch of stuff you might like to read". It's unlikely to be well used or maintained, and quickly becomes a magnet for spam. >> What article >> needs more than about 5 to 10 external links to cover the issues that >> haven't been addressed in the inline citations and the text? > > Any article where the editors are largely absent and will not use even > gift-wrapped excerpted references; as is the case for >400 articles > with hundreds of thousands/millions of readers, which I just spent a > great deal of time demonstrating. So maybe what you actually demonstrated is that dumping a site onto "external references" is much less useful to readers or other editors than finding a place in the text where it would actually be relevant and typing <ref>[http://www.example.com/index.html The editing community is alive and well - Example.com]</ref> -- David Richfield e^(πi)+1=0 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l