OK Everyone knows you shouldn’t have links that say please click here to find out about giraffes instead you should have something more like ‘Giraffes are fascinating creatures’.
The point being that people know you have to click on links so having the text ‘click here’ as the a link is like having a door with sign saying ‘this is a door’. In addition people have to read on to find out where the link will take them whereas in the second example there is an immediate connection between the link and it’s probably destination.
Well. I think it’s easy to overdo this. Metafilter is a prime example.
There is an unpleasant tendency for people to write stuff like: Giraffes have many fascinating qualities that you should know about.
(I’m not exaggerating - about Metafilter that is, not giraffes)
In fact I think links in a body of text should only be used when space is short. I would much prefer something more like…
Giraffes are blah de blah de blah de blah de blah de blah de blah de blah de blah:
- National Geographic Kids page on giraffes
- Great nature-wildlife.com giraffe page
- Wikipedia entry on the Giraffe
- Giraffes at San Diego Zoo
There. Isn’t that nicer? It interupts your flow if you’re trying to talk about something else but can’t the links wait until the end of your paragraph?
Even worse than the Metafilter disease is something I’ve noticed at Wikipedia and also at sites that use a Content Management System that tried to helpfully automatically add hyperlinks to any keywords that it spots. Look at the Wikipedia giraffe article (I must be obsessed with giraffes today)
Look at the words hyperlinked in the opening paragraphs. OK. I might want to know what an Okapi is it’s helpful to have that word linked.
But hyperlinking ‘metres’? Hyperlinking ‘animal’?
Why stop there? Maybe I need to know what ‘tallest’, ‘land’ and ‘living’ mean so link to those pages too. There’s still the words ‘all‘ and ‘and‘ left without a blue underline…
And I’ve seen even sillier examples on other Wikipedia pages. At least they don’t hyperlink to a live stock quote on every single mention of a companies name.
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I think it’s really useful if you don’t speak english, or the language the article is written in. you can find some help by clicking on links. of course some times it’s too much. That’s why i like tags in a separated-box.
That is a good point Tellos but I suppose the question still stands - where do you draw the line? You admit yourself that too many links get’s annoying. I follow links to unfamiliar terms myself but some of the words linked in Wikipedia are just silly. Anyone with enough command of English to read the article would know what they meant.
Yesss that’s true. and there is enough language translator, on the web, widget ones etc… So most of the time the links are useless. What would be interessting is how many people click on that kind of link. And if the click by mistake or not. But is wikipedia studying that kind of behavior?
This used to bother me but I think the way I read webpages has changed to the point where I can ignore inline wiki links unless I need them.
What doesn’t go away is how the linking encourages ADD-style wiki-browsing. That does tend to make a research session less productive, though possibly more fun.
I can ignore the wiki style links. The metafilter style bugs me but I can see it’s part of MeFi’s quirky charm.
Good luck with researching stuff on Wikipedia. I have never managed to end up reading less than 10 articles simultaneously any time I’ve dipped in.