WikiGuide/PageDiscussion/Draft comments/suggestions

[Marc Kaplan]

Looking at both points back-to-back like this, I think, unfortunately, 
just like even Wikipedia, it's not a matter of standard preferences, but 
of usage and necessity.  With the number of people working on this, and 
the number of documents involved, it would be impossible to develop a 
full standard.  I can see how it would be up to the creator of the 
article to use "some" common sense while still trying to follow a 
standard of some level.

Example,

In the official docs that you reference, it really would make no sense 
to use the full URL because of how lengthy it is. 

[[URL|Music and audio]]  would look like 
[[/8.04/musicvideophotos/C/index.html]]

That would make absolutely no sense to the user and doesn't tell them at 
all what the page is really about.  In fact, I have yet to find any 
where in the documents as to how that URL was developed (I haven't 
worked on any of the official docs or bug fixes yet either).

BUT....in the community docs, the article titles are a bit more generic, 
not platform/version based within the URL, like Wikipedia.  Therefore 
there is a bit more latitude to work with:

* [[DrivesAndPartitions|Drives and Partitions]]

This may sound like nit-picking, but the main issue that I was 
originally bringing up is, like Phil says, that links should *always* be 
renamed in human-readable format *with spaces* and have the "/" removed 
to look cleaner and that it should state that somewhere.  IMHO, at no 
time should "/" appear within a link visible to the reader/user.

(*I* personally couldn't find it anywhere, but it might be somewhere 
that I missed)

But now you bring up another point that I had not considered.  If 
necessary, the link should be explanatory/descriptive, rather than just 
cleaner and human readable.  What I mean by this is, instead of 
[[CreatePages | Create Pages]], there are at least 2 other ways this can 
be written:

[[CreatePages | How to create new pages]] or [[CreatePages | Creating 
new pages]]

Is this really something we can standardize into specific rules or 
should we leave it up to the author's discretion/common sense?

I guess it would really depends on how explanatory/descriptive and 
obvious the actual article title is to the reader/user.  If the title is 
descriptive enough, *or renamed in link context to be descriptive 
enough*, it really shouldn't need the extra explanatory text.  A general 
rule that I have always gone by is: "The less text users have to read 
for a link, and the more obvious it is, the faster it will be for them 
to find the information they are looking for."


Marc K.