[Wikipedia-l] Re: Page fragment links

Fri Jul 19 00:33:34 UTC 2002

Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:

>I'd be happy to disable this feature for now (and another
>undocumented feature I won't mention :-), but my first inclination is
>to leave it in and simply not document or encourage it.  That way,
>the only folks likely to use it are those who go out of their way to
>look for it because they really need it. And I /do/ think there are
>at least a few cases where its use is entirely appropriate.

Although I still think that this is a great idea,
I'm going to make a stronger (or more precise) statement than before
and say that it should *not* be implemented until we're certain how.
That is, until we've discussed the notation well enough
that we have a version that will at least be backwards compatible,
then we shouldn't allow any articles to be created with it.
We can start discussing this now, and if we decide by Saturday, fine.
Otherwise wait.

For an example of the sort of incompatibility that I mean,
recall my idea to render "[[##History]]" as "<a name="History">History</a>"
(with generalisations like "[[##History|Herstory]]",
to be rendered as "<a name="History">Herstory</a>").
It now renders as "<a name="History"></a>", which is very different.
People will code "[[##History]]History",
which is not backwards compatible if we adopt my suggestion later.

-- Toby Bartels
   toby+wikipedia-l at math.ucr.edu