Think before you link

Every so often someone will Wikify an article I wrote.

This is usually a good thing, if I am writing prose I do not necessarily think to turn proper names into hyperlinks.

But then there are the people who think that they have to link every single word to an article regardless of whether it is relevant or not.

In general there should be a link to most proper nouns. Links to common nouns should be used with care. Consider for example:

Bill Clinton took a bicycle ride.
Bill Clinton proposed a museum of the bicycle

It is clear that Bill Clinton should be hyperlinked, names are proper nouns. And it is also clear that a person reading the second line is likely to be interested in the history of the bicycle. But hyperlinking in the first case really makes no sense, bicyles are notable, Presidents are notable, a President taking a bike ride might be notable, but the link is not.

This is not just an irritation, it is distracting. It is good to be concise, a flabby article of thirty pages does not make the same punch as a concise three paragraphs. Its the same with links. Linking every word in an article does not provide as much information to the user as linking the best ones.

A much better way to solve the navigation issue would be to change the browser. A dictionary link Wikipedia should have a meta tag on each page to tell the browser that there is a search index for the site. It should be possible to select a chunk of text and then right click to get a list of search engines that might be used to search for it.

Machines should do, people should think.