Help talk:Self link

mention purpose

Mention the purpose of self links. --Jidanni 2006-12-29

I agree with Jidanni's request, and I disagree with Patrick's statement that Help:Navigational template "explains the usefulness of the self-link feature." Also, this article on self links is the more appropriate place for any such explanation. After an initial attempt at some minor copy editing to clarify the "self-link feature" phrase, I decided that "self-link format" would be more readily understandable. So, I'll make an attempt to clarify the article further. --71.197.71.235 13:15, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Purpose

The first sentence;

By itself, it is not useful to create bold text this way.

Thinking of the W3C's Separate structure and presentation, and Wikipedia's "bold the reiteration of the title", this gives a selflink a semantic quaity.
From 16:48, 29 January 2009 (UTC) TedPavlic

I don't view the self links as a method for bolding. I view the Wikipedia convention of wikifying relevant words the first time they are used as implying that the subject of an article should be wikified as well. I don't view double square brackets purely as a link; I view them as an identifier of a word that is so relevant and important that it deserves its own page. Hence, if that relevant keywords is on its own page, it gets bolded, and if it's on a different page, it gets linked. The wikification isn't a link itself; it's an identification of an important word.

Mediawiki has already decided on giving it a semantic construct by encapsulating it in the <strong> tag, not the bold tag - I happen to think this is both good error catching, and a pleasingly elegant touch to turn this user "error" into a useful feature. It is also given further meaning by the CSS class attribute; <strong class="selflink">.

It seems to me that the purpose behind the translation from wiki-markup of selflinks is not just to "warn" users, and save them from themselves, but also to give room for CSS files to make use of it.

So, from a Wikipedia perspective, I would strike the first sentence;

By itself, it is not useful to create bold text this way.

And replace it with;

Using self-links for the reiteration of an article title, guarantees, by dint of the configuration of Wikipedia, that the article will conform to Wikipedia's style convention, even if that convention changes.

I hope this gives the idea - it would have to be changed to give it universality, but I didn't want to water down the idea by doing this as I'm not familiar with any other wiki's. HarryAlffa 19:28, 28 May 2009 (UTC)