Wikipedia talk:Historical archive/Logs/Offline reports/This page links many times to the same article

Dates

I went through the list of 200 articles shown at Wikipedia:Offline reports/This page links many times to the same article and removed the repeated links that causing the article to be noted. Now Rmhermen has drawn my attention to something that I was not aware of, i.e. that Wikipedia looks at two different links to construct a date. Thus a link can have an effect beyond the link itself. I am no longer able to maintain my concept of links as individual entities. It may be that this is an exception for handling dates but it may also be a precedent.

I am asking for two things:

• A bot that would sort out multiple links to the same page. Having several 100 links to the same article is silly. I made a request at Wikipedia:Bot requests. Feel free to make your views known there.

• A debate about the concept of links as individual entities rather than parts of pairs, triplets etc and how that is made explicit to editors. I was quite surprised that I am no longer able to look at the text in the edit window and predict what will happen to each link bounded by [[ and ]].

Bobblewik  (talk) 20:58, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I don't know if a bot would be a good idea - in prose, certainly, something shouldn't be linked more than once per section. However in some article layouts, such as table/list formats, not having every instance of a name linked is annoying. For example, in Swimming at the 2004 Summer Olympics - Men's 50 metre Freestyle you can see the final eight, but their names are not linked. You have to look through the whole page to find the first heat that the swimmer competed in, in order to find a link to the article about the individual swimmer.

I don't know if it would be useful, or worthwhile, to have a tag/template in an article that causes any link in that article to be replicated to all other instances of the same word in that article, and/or another tag/template that autmoatically removes the second and all further instances of a linked word. -- Chuq 00:20, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

If we want to do this, a bot is not the way to do it. It would be very easy to change the MediaWiki code to ignore duplicate links to the same article. I don't think we should be doing this, for the reasons given above, but if we're going to do it it shouldn't be via a bot. anthony (see warning) 16:27, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)