3 Responses to URLs and Wikipedia »»

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1. Peregrinato Comment by Peregrinato | 2006/03/13 at 01:40:37

   “The author bemoaned the practice of having hyperlinks in the middle of a sentence” Oh, poor baby! Apparently he’s never read anything with footnotes! Do footnotes at the end of a paragraph threat the integrity of his reading experience? God forbid, he might not get to the next paragraph!

   Even more disturbing, no doubt, are those pesky mid-paragraph footnotes–the type that suggest that a paragraph contains multiple references. I’m sure these are just too tempting.

   And mid-sentence footnotes!? An abomination! They threaten the meaning of the sentence itself!

   Yeah, I lack sympathy. If he can’t negotiate hyperlinks mid-sentence, don’t read, period.

2. keaven Comment by keaven | 2006/03/13 at 06:46:19

   wow… what strong feelings on the subject, you have. I never knew that i would hit a nurve with this.

   I don’t really agree with that person’s strong feelings against it, however, i do understand what he’s talking about. Sometimes even I end up clicking on things and 10 minutes later am reading something compleatly off-topic through a series of clicks. When i’m clicking away from something i havn’t finished reading, though, i always open them in new tabs so that i don’t loose the original point… it might take me a while to come back to it.. but i do.

   I’m not sure that ‘footnotes’ are the best example. You only have to glance down at the bottom of the page you’re reading in order to read a footnote. It would be more like…. if the footnote cited a reference in some other book, and you got up to go get that book, looked up the reference, and then got caught up in the material in THAT book.. seeing a footnote that referenced yet another book, got up to get ANOTHER book, and got caught up reading THAT one….soon you’re 5 books away from the one you were originally reading.

   That dosn’t happen much with books… but its the authors assursion that this type of thing happens all the time due to the comvienance of hyperlinking. I don’t agree that its a bad thing, mind you… it just leaves more room for error from the general population. And as we all know, individual people can be smart, but the general population is rather stupid.

3. Roy Comment by Roy | 2006/03/13 at 14:11:43

   But that would happen to me as a kid with our trusty World Book encyclopedia. I’d be looking up something (sometimes for schoolwork), and, thanks to those “See also” entries, Mom would find me an hour later sitting on the floor amidst piles of volumes. As an aside, every year I would look forward to when the Year Book came, and I would spend hours pasting the update stickers into the relevant entries of the encyclopedia.

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