Mailing List Archive

Anchor
Bonjour,
Do Wikipedia have already a support to HTML anchors ?
It can be fine to be able to define anchors and add it to links.
Those following lines are not interpreted by the parser :
<a name="MyAnchorName"></a>
<a href="#MyAnchorName">Go to my anchor</a>
It can be usefull to target a paragraph in an article.
Any solution ?
If there are no support yet, I prose the fellowing :

[[anchor:MyAnchorName]] to set an anchor, and

[[ArticleName#MyAnchorName|DisplayText]] to link to anchors in an other articles, and

[[#MyAnchorName|DisplayText]] to link to anchors in same article.

What do you think about that ?

Guillaume (as Aoineko)
Re: Anchor [ In reply to ]
Can't you read my message ?
Or aren't you intrested in my question ?
Some people on the french's Wikipedia think that anchors are very important features and are waiting for your answer...

Guillaume
Re: Anchor [ In reply to ]
> > Some people on the french's Wikipedia think that anchors are very
> > important features and are waiting for your answer...
>
> I seem to remember that Lee half-implemented anchors a while back, but
> they're not actually enabled. If nobody else can answer more fully,
I'll
> go look over the code and see what still needs to be done.

We've had a discussion about anchors on wikipedia-l, and there were
serious arguments against anchors. I short: Anchors are subpages through
the backdoor. If an article is so long that it really needs anchors:
split it! Shorten it and put the delailed parts in their own articles.

Please read my message on wikipedia-l from july:
http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-July/002791.html
and all others titled "page fragment links" (and some of the "Numbered
section headings" may contain discussion about this, too).
http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-July/thread.html

We've hat some kind of compromise that an index function could be
implemented, that shows the headlines at the beginning of an article.

If you really think anchors should be implemented please ask for it on
wikipedia-l and we can go through this again.

Kurt
Re: Anchor [ In reply to ]
Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> Can't you read my message ?
> Or aren't you intrested in my question ?
> Some people on the french's Wikipedia think that anchors are very
> important features and are waiting for your answer...

I seem to remember that Lee half-implemented anchors a while back, but
they're not actually enabled. If nobody else can answer more fully, I'll
go look over the code and see what still needs to be done.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Re: Anchor [ In reply to ]
Thank you Brion & Kurt.
I read all post about the subject on wikipedia-l and founded this :

That's another thing to think about. BTW, I implemented page
fragment links (e.g., [[Chemistry#history]], which links to
[[##history]] on the Chemistry page), though I haven't made much
noise about it because I'm still not sure they're needed--for one
thing, they encourage long pages, and I don't like my syntax. But
headings do seem like a natural match there.

Does this system still alive ?
The french Wikipedians agree (in the majority) about the fact that too long
articles need to be slice in sub-articles, but perhaps we don't have the
same definition of what a TOO LONG article is.
For exemple, I don't think this article
http://fr.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Pharaon is too long.
Instead, I think in this case, anchors sould be really a usefull feature.
The other case where we NEED achors, is for discussions.
For exemple our vote page (http://fr.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Wikipedia-Vote)
is a vote only page.
To make this page more readable, we moved discussion about the voting
subject on other pages.
We want to be able to target an exact place in this discussion pages.
I disagree the argument that implement anchors will encourage people to make
more long articles.
We have to trust people to be enough mature to understand the benefit of
having short articles.
Even if someone write too long article, it's really easy to cut it in small
part if you think it is necessary.
Do you think I had better to post this message on wikipedia-l ?
Cheers,

Guillaume (Aoineko)
Re: Re: Anchor [ In reply to ]
>> Can't you read my message ?
>> Or aren't you intrested in my question ?
>> Some people on the french's Wikipedia think that anchors are very
>> important features and are waiting for your answer...

> I seem to remember that Lee half-implemented anchors a while back,
> but they're not actually enabled. If nobody else can answer more
> fully, I'll go look over the code and see what still needs to be
> done.

Yes, they were fully implemented, but then I disabled them upon
request and discussion by the list, because the syntax for
specifying them was awkward and others felt the ability was
premature and likely to be abused. I'm still working (slowly) on
reforming wikitext syntax in general, so I hadn't gotten back to
the issue of anchor syntax specifically, but if the list agrees
to a syntax it will be trivial to re-enable the code.

The link code is in fact still present; [[page#anchor]] and
[[#localanchor]] will produce a link exactly as expected. My
original syntax for placing the anchor itself as [[##anchor]],
but other suggestions are welcome.
Re: Re: Anchor [ In reply to ]
>The link code is in fact still present; [[page#anchor]] and
>[[#localanchor]] will produce a link exactly as expected. My
>original syntax for placing the anchor itself as [[##anchor]],
>but other suggestions are welcome.

For link, [[page#anchor]] and [[#localanchor]] seem to be natural because I
proposed the same syntax without knowing of your proposition ;o)
For anchor creation syntax, I though about [[anchor:MyAnchorName]].
Where "anchor" will be translate in the local language file to be more
comprehensible.
One more time I think it's really sad to deprive ourself of using a good
feature just because of the fear that someone use it in "bad" way.

Guillaume (Aoineko)

PS : other proposition : #ANCHOR anchorname (like #REDIRECT article)