Fixing Links

Problem: Browsing Wiki, you see a bunch of things that look like this: [1] [2].

They're obviously supposed to be links of some sort, but where do they point?

Solution: Go to the URL field in your browser and replace "wiki" with "links". For example, change:

 http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FixingLinks

to

 http://c2.com/cgi/links?FixingLinks

You'll see a text-only list of the references, followed by the URLs that are supposed to go with them.

Now take a moment to improve Wiki:

1. Copy that list
2. Go back to the page
3. Click the page's edit link
4. Paste the list at the bottom of the page
5. (Extra-special bonus credit) Track down each [1] and replace it with [actual URL]

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Ward: why not just include the links automagically at the end of every page? -- GeorgePaci

There has been link abuse that I don't completely understand. The link script reports the links as text/plain where they don't mess up anything. A better solution to this is on my list of things to discover. -- WardCunningham

I should have been clearer: why not take exactly what appears on the links output (plain, dead, non-clickable things you can copy and paste into your browser's URL field) and stick it into each page right near the end? Or is it too hard to get around the processing that finds links and generates the linking HTML for them? -- GeorgePaci

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This BookMarklet automates the above given solution:

 javascript:top.location="http://c2.com/cgi/links"+top.location.search

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It is worthwhile to point out that pages can contain their own footnotes, which are sometimes identified with the convention, "[Note 1]", etc. These pages have a numeric list of notes at the bottom of the page. The notes are placed at the page bottom to prevent a disturbance of the "flow" of reading the page, whilst not losing the linkage between the original source material and the supporting note down below. See pages such as BadAssVillain for excellent examples of this practice in action.

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CategoryWikiMaintenance