UESPWiki:Archive/CP Links in Descriptions

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Links in Descriptions

To introduce this topic, let me paste in the soon-to-be-deleted conversation from Oblivion talk:Fort Carmala/Description

(show the old conversation)

:I added links to this description, but then I saw that the links had been removed last year. It has been done for several place descriptions. Should they be linked or not? --Mankar Camoran 10:54, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

That's true of most of them. Look at Oblivion:Places and check out the histories for descriptions with links. You'll (normally) find that the links were originally there, then got taken off (usually by Nephele), then got put back again (usually by Giamgiam). Whilst you're on the Places page, try to imagine what it would look like if every city and every inhabitant type was linked. I imagine you're picturing the same sea of blue as me. Links in the Description pages work well on their parent page (by which I mean, say, Oblivion:Bleak Flats Cave is Oblivion:Bleak Flats Cave/Description's parent) but look awful on compilation pages like Places or the road pages. I'd leave off the links myself. There will always be the map link, and people can use that to link to the nearest city instead. --Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 11:09, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

I agree with you. I actually saw the Venerable Vintage page and thought of adding links to those places' descriptions by seeing the parent page. But they don't look good when compiled. A link may not be necessary as well for the reason you have given. I will remove links to the 2 descriptions that I added for the sake of consistency. --Mankar Camoran 11:28, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Yep, rpeh hit the nail on the head ;) Although on individual place pages the links are useful, on Oblivion:Places it was overkill. I started by creating all of the description pages with links. Too bad histories don't work for something like this (since you can't pull up a page that transcludes old versions of 200 other pages), because at one point the sea of blue rpeh envisions really did exist! Seeing that, I then went back through and deleted them all.

Unfortunately, it's not the only example where description pages have problems. There are other cases where it would ideally be nice to have slight differences between the descriptions shown in different places. Maybe someday there'll be time to figure out some better solutions ;) --Nephele^Talk 12:46, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Thanks for the info, Nephele :). Another thing I noticed on Oblivion:Places is, a few descriptions in between have links, but most of them don't. Wouldn't it be better if those links are removed because it looks a bit odd to have a few links in between? I suppose they should all be linked or none should be linked. I can remove them if necessary. I am saying this just for the sake of consistency. Any thoughts on this? --Mankar Camoran 15:52, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Yep, I agree it would be good to have them all be consistent. When I finished my edits with them (a year and a half ago...), they were consistent ;) Since then links on various pages have been reinstated, and without any type of community discussion (like this) about which format would be preferred, it didn't seem worth the effort of uniformly imposing one format or the other. (Actually, for the record, there was one very brief discussion at Oblivion talk:Places#Redundant Links). If everyone is in agreement that no-links is the preferred approach, then I'd say that should be done on all the place description pages. --Nephele^Talk 16:43, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

I'd be happy with the No Links option. It's definitely better to be consistent where possible. --Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 16:55, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Alright then. I'll start removing them since both of you agree. Thanks. --Mankar Camoran 09:45, 19 October 2007 (EDT)

This conversation is now moot thanks to Nephele's template changes. Basically, we can now define a variable called "trimlinks" on any place page that is getting overwhelmed with links and they will no longer appear. I've already done this on pages like Oblivion:Ayleid Ruins and Oblivion:Forts. See this edit for an example of how simple it is to do. This only works with pages that use the {{Place Link}} template, but there's no reason why the same principle can't be used elsewhere if necessary.

In summary: if people want to start adding links to descriptions, they can go ahead! rpeh •T•C•E• 20:14, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Yup! Since the only issue with the links has now been addressed, nothing should stop people from adding links now. --Timenn-<talk> 15:11, 26 January 2010 (UTC)