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Response and questions to reversions in these diffs by @Beland [1], and @Doug Weller [2]

Searching on "inappropriate usage of internal link" I found: Help:Link § Wikilinks (internal links), which states "A wikilink (or internal link) is a link from one page to another page within the English Wikipedia ...."

Within Wikipedia, I have seen the internal link syntax used to link to a section within the same article many times, and obviously the Wiki language syntax allows this (since it generates HTML). Links within an article (implemented as a web page by Wikipedia) to other sections (HTML anchors) in the same article are valuable in at least some cases, and that is what I wanted to do here After more searching, I found the following:

Template:Slink, which states: "This template is appropriate ... to reference sections within the same article. (Wikilinks to sections in other articles appear to be used appropriately here).

In the future, I suggest not only mentioning inappropriate usage of a wikilink, but recommend use of Template:Slink.

Questions: Are the internal links in the first paragraphs of Wikipedia:BRD inappropriate internal links (i.e., links to the same page, not another)? Should a section link be used instead? Does the indirection via the redirect WP:BRB change this?

Unless I hear an objection I plan to begin using section links. I have already begun using them on Talk pages. On some other pages I am aware of, internal link syntax should be changed to section link syntax.

Comments?

Looking though all these administrative guidelines and sampling the contributions of senior editors, I have gained an appreciation for the work that goes on behind the scenes to keep Wikipedia at the level of quality it has in many articles. Than you for all that you do! Dmcdysan (talk) 17:13, 11 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Dmcdysan: Normally article introductions don't say "as explained below" because readers are simply expected to continue reading if they want more information, or click on the table of contents. Typically every piece of the intro is simply summarizing more detailed information in the body, so cross-referencing in this way would lead to a lot of bloat and make article intros harder to read. If you think readers will doubt what they are reading in the intro and need immediate access to reliable supporting sources (as MOS:LEADCITE implies is more likely for controversial subjects), the most common way to do that cleanly is to add inline citations that point to the same footnotes as the body. If you put a "name" field in the ref tag like, <ref name="Bik">...</ref> in the body for the Bik paper, and then <ref name="Bik" /> in the intro, they will both point to the same footnote without duplicating the citation in the wikitext. -- Beland (talk) 23:50, 11 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Beland, thank you for the response and general guidance but that was not my question. The pointer needed is not to a footnote but a section in the same article. I want to insert a link to sections on the same page (and other pages), similar to what is done twice in the first paragraph of Wikipedia:BRD as described above. This uses an internal link (wikilink), which is what had I done her: you deleted it, I added some text back trying to address what I apparently misunderstood your concern and then @Doug Weller reverted my edit because it was an inappropriate internal link (the same as used in WP:BRD).. I was trying to confirm that I should use the Section link template should be used so that you, Doug or some other editor doesn't delete the link and instead would advise the editor to use the section link. If you or Doug can provide me a pointer I can try to get the Internal link (wikilink) document revised to help make such editing consistent. Thank you. Dmcdysan (talk) 05:47, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Dmcdysan: I think the point is that while a link to an anchor on the same page is syntactically possible, as a matter of style they are not used in these circumstances. Internal links to other article pages are extremely common and not at issue here. Policy pages like WP:BRD don't follow encyclopedic style, and not useful to emulate when editing articles. -- Beland (talk) 06:27, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Beland, can you identify Wikipedia documentation for the matter of style where section links are not to be used in particular circumstances? My intent was to us this in more than the instance being discussed.
I guess I could put it in the text as follows: "these items are described in the evidence section" I don't believe it would be obvious to a reader just looking at the table of contents in this case.
According to Template:Section link it is used on approximately 68,000 pages and explicitly states: which states: "This template is appropriate ... to reference sections within the same article." Dmcdysan (talk) 10:57, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Beland, this page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Links shows in the table in the Internal links section that states "If you're trying to create a wikilink to the current page, you probably want to link to a specific section or to an anchor within the page; see the examples below."
See in the table the row header "Link to an anchor on the same page" that gives an example to the section "See Also" on that page. I believe this is similar to the syntax that both you and @Doug Weller indicated as inappropriate use of an internal link when deleting and reverting my edits. Dmcdysan (talk) 11:13, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Beland, Here is an example of an article that is not a policy page and uses multiple such links as described above, Great Pyramid of Giza § Interior
I recall seeing it in a number of other instances as well.
Seems like technically a search could be done across Wikipedia for usages of this type of link, but I am not sure if such a thing has been implemented.
In the absence of a written policy it is unclear how consistency of this could be achieved in Wikipedia. I am going to hold off doing any more edits of this type and just type things in text until I can read some documentation regarding matter of style.
I am trying to be difficult, just get some clarity on the applicable guidelines. Thank you. Dmcdysan (talk) 11:31, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Dmcdysan: Text like "these items are described in the evidence section" should be unnecessary, as readers are expected to simply continue reading past the intro if they want more details. If you're worried about people curious about the proposed boundary layer not being able to jump to the right section from the table of contents, we could change the section title from "Hypothetical impact markers" to "Hypothetical impact markers and boundary layer". Or whatever other section title changes you think would be helpful to navigation.
The Help:Links page is just showing what is technically possible and how to do it; it is not part of the English Wikipedia's style manual. (As you can see, it's on a different, though affiliated, website.)
Counting the number of articles using {{section link}} doesn't tell us much; I use that template all the time to make links to anchors on other pages, which generally seems to speed navigation. I could search a database dump to see how many articles link to same-page anchors from their introductions, but that wouldn't necessarily tell us whether they should be doing that. To answer this type of question in the absence of style guidelines, I like to see what a random assortment of Wikipedia:Featured articles are doing in similar situations; these articles have been highly vetted and generally represent best practices at the time of approval (though they may decay over time).
Great Pyramid of Giza is not linking to sections from its introduction; it's linking to subsections from an image caption. I think that's actually a good use of same-page anchor links. Linking from infoboxes is also often useful to avoid duplication or to direct readers to a longer explanation of a complicated situation. Even there, it's better to link the existing words and try to avoid adding words just for the sake of making a link. Sometimes linking from the prose of one section to another section is done, but I find that's usually a sign that the organization of the article could be improved.
Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section contains the most direct advice specifically concerning article introductions that I could find in a quick search: "gives the basics in a nutshell and cultivates interest in reading on—though not by teasing the reader or hinting at what follows". "The lead should stand on its own", that page says, partly because Wikipedia articles are recycled in other distribution channels, and often truncated. If the intro to this article were to show up without the body as a Google search result, for example, or in a print version of Wikipedia, or as a transclusion in another Wikipedia article, it would be undesirable for the text to refer to later sections (whether with plain text or with a hyperlink) that weren't included. -- Beland (talk) 15:18, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Beland, thank you for the thoughtful response. If it's in the TOC, no need to mention it in text - got it. Changing section titles breaks other links to that anchor so in general I think that is not a good idea - I already fixed one on this site that I believe was several years old. Looking at a few instances I recall, the same-page anchor links are in the body, and in a complex article that may be warranted. There is another such link in the Giza article. The MOS lead section reference is very helpful - I had not seen that before - I will read it carefully. I believe the lead section in the YDIH article could be improved to better meet these guidelines. Adding some of your suggestions to existing Wikipedia guidelines could be helpful to other editors and I leave it to your judgment as to how best do that. I believe that I understand your comments and will take them into consideration in any future editing that I may do.
Regarding, a truncated result the print version would have the same issue for every type of link. Regarding recycling distribution channels, I believe in rendering the HTML Wikipedia resolves all links to external links (read that somewhere) and know that same-page links get expanded to a full internal link. A truncated portion of an article with a link would then take a user back to the Wikipedia site and not the recycling site, unless that site alters this (I have seen this in a few cases). To address this, an editor could make every link in a lead section external if that is a concern.
Due to personal matters, I will only be intermittently active for a few months, but I will remember this if/when I start editing again. Dmcdysan (talk) 17:09, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Section titles do need to change from time to time, and we shouldn't be afraid that they are so fragile that we leave bad titles in place. Broken section links can be automatically detected, and will eventually be fixed. If you want to fix them right away, you can check through the "what links here" page [3] or even quicker, search for such links directly: [4]. From those search results, I see that no other articles link to this section.
For print distribution, hyperlinks would presumably be stripped out entirely because paper does not do anything when you poke at it, and there's no guarantee that the article referred to is important enough to be included in the print distribution. Which is why the text of the intro prose is supposed to stand on its own.
Internal links always need to use the internal link wiki syntax because if the entire project is copied, those links need to resolve to website of the copy of Wikipedia, not the official English Wikipedia. Links that use external link wiki syntax stay the same on web sites that just copy Wikipedia in full. (Sometimes there is a link back to the source Wikipedia article for copyright legal reasons, but that's added by the copying site outside the article text.)
We can actually see content recycling of this article in action on Duck Duck Go: [5]. All the links get stripped out and only plain text remains. So when the older version of this article was live, the phrase "as detailed in the sections on Evidence and Hypothetical impact markers;" appeared on that Duck Duck Go page (if you click the down arrow to expand the Wikipedia excerpt). Which is confusing for Duck Duck Go users, because there are no such sections on that page. -- Beland (talk) 23:26, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

YDIT page outdated

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This page seems to align with the issues pointed out in the linked paper.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10450282/ Contenteditalexa (talk) 21:28, 11 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Grzegorz Racki and Christian Koeberl deprecates YDIH in review paper about Phanerozoic impact event stratigraphy

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In the online preprint of their review of Phanerozoic impact event stratigraphy, Racki and Koeberl (2024), Grzegorz Racki and Christian Koeberl write very unfavorably of the YDIH. They comment that it is an extreme example" of of Tsujita’s (2001) “Great Expectations Syndrome”. They also write: To date, any cometary scar is not yet confirmed unequivocally on the Earth surface, and for the even most questionable evidence of a Younger Dryas comet impact, any young and minimally-eroded end-Pleistocene crater is markedly lacking (Holliday et al., 2023). and In protest against such an excessive burden of useless literature, the speculative Younger Dryas impact scenario was refuted in a comprehensive review by Holliday et al. (2023).

Finally, other recent papers, Ives (2023) and Montanari and others (2024), also directly dispute and challenge the YDIH in recently published studies. In thse papers, they both provide detailed arguments in support of their conclusions.

References:

Holliday, V.T., Daulton, T.L., Bartlein, P.J., Boslough, M.B., Breslawski, R.P., Fisher, A.E., Jorgeson, I.A., Scott, A.C., Koeberl, C., Marlon, J.R. and Severinghaus, J., 2023. Comprehensive refutation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH). Earth-Science Reviews, 247, p.104502.

Ives, J.W., 2023. The PaleoIndigenous Component of the Ahai Mneh Site (FiPp-33), Lake Wabamun, Alberta. Archaeology on the Brink, Papers in Honour of John W. Brink, Archaeological Survey of Alberta Occasional Paper, 42, pp.95-115.

Montanari, A., Koeberl, C., Schulz, T., Smith, V.C., Molnár, M. and Tóth-Hubay, K., 2024. An air-fall ash layer in the Grotta dei Baffoni cave in the Frasassi Gorge (Marche Apennine, Italy): Relevance to the Younger Dryas debate. Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, 450, p.108067.

Racki, G. and Koeberl, C., 2024. The impact catastrophism and Alvarez theory of mass extinctions in a retrospective, perspective and prospective: towards the Phanerozoic impact event stratigraphy. Earth-Science Reviews, p.104904

Tsujita, C.J., 2001. The significance of multiple causes and coincidence in the geological record: from clam clusters to Cretaceous catastrophe. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, 38, 271–292. https://doi.org/10.1139/e00-048 Paul H. (talk) 02:39, 1 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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