User:Howard C. Berkowitz/Strong Articles

Orphaned articles, isolated articles, or walled gardens of articles, are problems because it is difficult or impossible to reach through following a logical set of wikilinks. Readers can find the material only if they enter just the right search string, which does not let them take best advantage of Citizendium's knowledge navigation.

A strong link is a wikilink that is:

• in the body of an article
• in a Related Articles page
• in explicit indexing pages
  • a redirect to a subsection, that redirect having an associated definition
  • a common prefix, such as AN-

An article is orphaned when fewer than three strong links point to it. An article is isolated when it cannot be reached through a series of strong links from the main page, a workgroup page, or a Core Article. Walled gardens are a set of articles that have strong links among one another, but all articles within the set are isolated.

Practical use

When writing an article, consider to what it can link, and what should point to it. If the author cannot come up with three potential strong links to it, perhaps that means that some more general articles need to be written first, to establish context.

Those strong links need to be created, so part of creating a new article is editing three or more pages so they link to the new page.

Editors, perhaps assisted by some future automated tool, need to stay aware of orphaned, isolated, or walled material. Creating strong links to an article does not constitute substantial editing of the article; an editor can still nominate that article for Approval if the editor made changes to the article itself, or to articles linking to it, only to prevent orphaning.

Need to consider

• "Permanent stubs", a class of article that is legitimately isolated, because the only reason it exists is to have a "linkable definition".