Battlestar Wiki:Think Tank/Red Link Policy

This page (like all pages on this wiki) was imported from the original English-language Battlestar Wiki based on what was available in the Wayback Machine in early 2017. You can see the archive of the original page here.

This is an archive successful proposal that was vetted through the Think Tank, a place where ideas of all kinds are proposed and worked upon by the community prior to implementation. Please do not modify this proposal.

This is a proposal aimed at discussing official approaches to dealing with "red links".

Red Link Policy

Given the recent discussion on my user page regarding the approaches to red links, I feel that we need to have a discussion on this small, yet important facet of Wiki existence.

There are two major, yet opposite approaches to dealing with the "red link".

Red Links foster growth

One school of thought is that red links help drive interest in creating the article(s) in question. The idea is that the user is given the opportunity to create the article through seeing the red link.

Red links are ineffective, and thus a more direct and guided approach is needed

The opposite school of thought is that red links are ineffective due to the following:

• The Special:Wantedpages page does not allow results to be filtered, thus all red links (from non-existent image links to user pages that haven't been created to general talk pages) are seen. New or non-technical users may be discouraged by the sheer amount of red link "overload" that they would be literally scared to contribute.
  • As corollary to the above point, many pages that are being translated into other languages that do not have their own dedicated language edition are also red linked.
• The Task Bot, which updates the task list every 12 hours, does not recognize those pages listed in Special:Wantedpages. Furthermore, given the fact that the results are unfilterable, having the taskbot tackle the wanted pages is unwise.
• A refined approach, namely tagging pages with {{requested}}, allows results to be filtered and permits the user to:
  • View a finite selection of pages that need to be created via the task list.
  • View an entire category of pages that have been requested, thus refining the results automatically, and allowing contributors to guide the development of the wiki, though not to the point of micro-management.