User talk:Wpbot

What is going on? World Blogs Clogs Elections The Bar (talk) (talk) (talk) (talk) (hic) Welcome to RationalWiki, Wpbot! Check out our guide for newcomers and our community standards! Tell us how you found RationalWiki here! If you are interested in contributing: Read what our articles are intended to be Check out the to-do list See our help page and Wikipedia's formatting cheatsheet If writing a new article, consider writing up a draft And most importantly: Pull up a goat and have some fun!

All hail our new robot overlords! human 16:31, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Should it ignore ones that are enclosed in "ref" tags? Hmm, maybe not... human 16:43, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Oy, I suppose it could..... tmtoulouse ^vex 16:47, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Also... is there any way you could get it to list what the link is in a given article? human 16:56, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Your lucky I am a genius. tmtoulouse ^vex 17:00, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

That depends on what you mean by "lucky"... I now have to continue my jihad against these links... human 18:28, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Hey, I just line 'em up.... tmtoulouse ^vex 18:33, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Just out of curiosity... why is this being done again? Other than an exercise of robotic power, I mean. Uchiha^KATON! 18:41, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Essentially because times have shifted as far as our view of wp links I suppose. There was a time when they were used quiet vigorously and frequently by users. Since then a lot of people have come to feel that many of these wp links should be converted to RW articles. I am neutral on the whole thing and merely provide the canvas on which to explore options. tmtoulouse ^vex 18:44, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

I see an obvious problem here. We have one user who hates WP links and another user who hates red links. The absence of a WP link almost necessitates a red link, at least until the article is written - and realistically, some articles will never be written. What will happen when these two forces of enthusiasm collide? --AKjeldsen^{Cum dissensie} 18:54, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Everyone else gets free entertainment. Jellyfish! 18:56, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

The answer to that question lies in the asking of another question.............what happens when an unmovable object is hit with an unstoppable force? tmtoulouse ^vex 18:56, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

A Kierkegaardian paradox arises, that's what happens.

Anyway, returning to the discussion in question - taking Magritte here as an example, we now have an article of three sentences instead of a link to a pretty good WP article. Barring the unexpected appearance of any art historians among us, I doubt our article on Magritte will ever anywhere near as good as the one on WP, and it's not really on mission anyway. Realistically, people who want to know something about Magritte will just go to WP in any case, so why not make things easy for our customers and give them a direct link? --AKjeldsen^{Cum dissensie} 19:15, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Anders, Anders, Anders, are we back to this discussion again? (I knew we would be). One thing is that the wp links make building the wiki harder, since "wanted pages" doesn't get populated. Another is, making it easy for people to leave your website is poor design. Anyway, people might want to know what we have to say about Magritte, even if it's weird so far. They may also want to see a picture of my garage door. By the way, I also added an auto-wp link to template:sci-outline, so there :P PS - "customers?" If we define customer as what it means (where the revenooz come from), we are our own customers! Trouble is, we could add a wp: link to a zillion places, since we often discuss technical topics or obscure people (us), but it wouldn't make RW "better". human 19:34, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Aren't we sacrificing usability for principle here?

I've never had a problem with seamless links to Wikipedia. And I don't find myself completely convinced -- replacing a Wikipedia link with a redlink actually removes information from easy access on the assumption that it will be replaced, which I think is a Bad Thing, primarily because we're a small operation and we can't count on the redlink being filled quickly. I'd like to offer a sacrifice to whatever codemonkeys we have floating around here -- catalog Wikipedia links under a page like the Wanted page with the understanding that they should be either converted to external links or turned into internal articles. It's ugly, but it at least ensures that the problem is not insurmountable. EVDebs 19:40, 14 May 2008 (EDT)