A fact from Woman-Ochre appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 26 October 2018 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
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I was I guess 'invited' to discuss removing links. I typically gnome by fixing typos and adding internal links, but found this article clearly overlinked compared to the vast majority of English Wikipedia articles. I admit the links are helpful for learning more information about things, but not every such case of helping people learn more information about things needs to be included in this article.
Some links have an ultimately net negative user experience, like Easter eggs for "man in disguise" (doesn't link to a specific man as I expected), "stolen" (doesn't link to a specific theft as I expected), "African", and "violent impulses toward the women". General knowledge words like "estate", "sports car", "clarinet", and major geographical features seem excessively linked.
Additionally, while written well and interesting, I also feel the narrative detail in general can be summarized significantly more as this is an encyclopedia. Hftf (talk) 23:22, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for responding.
To go through the links I would not consider overlinking individually:
"Stolen". I felt that, since a large part of what makes this painting notable is the story of its theft and recovery, it would be essential to link art theft from the text on first possible mention. I can see that linking to theft in general would be overlinking as an everyday word, but since art theft is a specific subcategory of theft that a reader might reasonably be expected to want to understand better as part of this article, I do not feel linking it to "stolen" is an overlink.
Perhaps we can consider some different wording that makes it clearer the link is to art theft, but I am not going to contort the language to do so.
"Estate". Years of researching, writing, editing and then keeping articles on my watchlist have taught me that the principles behind WP:NOTBLUE and WP:OBVIOUS apply as much to linking as to citing. There is no better way to learn just what knowledge isn't really so common than editing Wikipedia regularly and seeing what people get confused enough about as to attempt to remedy with an edit. In this case I just have learned that there are too many people out there who would confuse estate (land) with estate (law) to not link the latter.
"Rust". Ties right into NOTBLUE. What shade do you think of when you think of rust (color)? Would it be somewhere around dark brown, or the hair color that gave the late Rusty Staub his nickname? Ask ten different people and you'd likely get a fair assortment of colors on the orange/red/brown axis.
"Carat" Do you know, off the top of your head without looking it up, how much in English or metric units one carat (mass) is, much less 120? Unless you work in gemology or jewelry, I would be surprised if you did. And I think that goes double or triple for readers.