User:Howard C. Berkowitz/Strong Articles

Template:TOC-right 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. It is Citizendium's policy that its articles should be strong, which have at least three strong links pointing to them.

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.

For authors of new articles

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.

For workgroup editors

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.

For Citizens, and perhaps Indexers

In the process of reading articles, a Citizen may come across an article that is not strongly linked. If it is possible to create links that make sense, doing so on the spot is encouraged. Certainly, a lot of articles now in place don't meet the strong linking goal, because it wasn't a stated goal when the article was written.

Role of the techniques in work planning

Hypothetically, if one did not know a specific case or policy, such as a topical matter of an Israeli detention of a Palestinian, or a Russian detention of a Chechen, one might be able to find the topic by starting at a "law" or "military" page, or perhaps name of country, and work one's way down to a page that gets to the subject of interest.

Remember that a Related Articles page almost certainly will start out Strong, and is a logical anchor point for more specific articles. When one has a specific article and is not sure how to put it into the system, a basic method may to start at a Workgroup or Core Article page, and then work down, perhaps creating Related Articles pages, even without having an associated full articles, until there are reasonable links to the specific topic.

Open issues

I think the key open issue is something that doesn't have a great name. Permanent stubs has been suggested. Lemma may give the flavor. It's a class of article that is legitimately isolated, because the only reason it exists is to have a "linkable definition" to be used within a small set of articles, and is implausible to be an external search term.. Such an article would be isolated but not orphaned.

Whether or not it is the best example, consider Constituent country‎. Is this an example of something that would only be used in the Walled Garden of Great Britain, which does sound like a promising book title? I've never seen the term used outside that context; would it be unlikely, then, that it would be a search engine argument and justify a cluster? In our terms, does it need to be able to link up to politics or geography? Does it need a constituent country/definition? How should it appear in an R-template, especially in Related Articles pages for Scotland, Great Britain, Wales, etc.? Howard C. Berkowitz 19:17, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

At present the working example for your "lemma" is Constituent country‎ and {{R|Constituent country‎}}, gives:

• Constituent country‎ [r]: A constituent country is a country that is part of a larger entity, such as the constituent countries of the United Kingdom (where the United Kingdom is the sovereign state). ^[e]

Obviously such a short article can exist as a definition only too. Would that not be the best route here? This then raise the old issue of how to deal with the inevitable red link. A redirect to the definition is one route. Possibly we could have the subpages template define all articles that have a definition only but no metadata in a "Lemma" category? (might need to think about this some more) Chris Day 19:27, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Redlink is indeed the first problem, as well as the related italic blue link produced by R-templates. The second is that it not be picked up as "uncategorized" so some helpful person puts subpages on it.

The third is that while it can be a short article or a definition-only, it has aspects of both. One of my wild thoughts is that with some kind of flag, it only needs to be created as one, and the text automatically transcludes to the other. Howard C. Berkowitz 19:33, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

This is early days but i just ran with your idea and made a template that can exist on the article but transclude the definition only subpage. I could rewrite the {{r}} template to get rid of the italics in this scenario, as well as rewriting the subpages template such that the {{lemma}} template is automatically placed on an article if a defintion subpage exists but there is no metadata. Therefore, the only template that would be needed on the article would be the subpages template. Let me know what other features are desirable. Chris Day 20:27, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Much of this is sounding more like a Zen koan. Let me see if I understand. At the time of creating Foo/Definition, in edit mode, something indicating "lemma" has to be included. Once that is done, the subpages template (is that the right word? Template? Page) gets created automatically, but the Foo (article) gets created automagically and transcludes the definition? In other words, all the author actually creates is the Definition? Howard C. Berkowitz 20:37, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

The author would presumably create the definition only subpage first, probably in response to a request from using the term with the R template. Then there would be the red link in the r template. To remove the red link the author could choose to create the article with nothing more than the subpages template. In that scenario the subpages template would transclude the definition in lieu of a real article and categorise it as a Lemma article, or whatever. At a later date, such an article could be expanded to be a real article with metadata. Chris Day 20:55, 6 December 2008 (UTC)