User:Howard C. Berkowitz/Strong Articles

Orphaned articles, isolated articles, or walled gardens of articles, are problems because it is difficult or impossible to reach through following a logical set of wikilinks. Readers can find the material only if they enter just the right search string, which does not let them take best advantage of Citizendium's knowledge navigation. It is Citizendium's policy that its articles should strong, each of which which have at least three strong links pointing to them.

A strong link is a wikilink that is:

• in the body of an article
• in a Related Articles page
• in explicit indexing pages
  • a redirect to a subsection, that redirect having an associated definition
  • a common prefix, such as AN-

An article is orphaned when fewer than three strong links point to it. An article is isolated when it cannot be reached through a series of strong links from the main page, a workgroup page, or a Core Article. Walled gardens are a set of articles that have strong links among one another, but all articles within the set are isolated.

For authors of new articles

When writing an article, consider to what it can link, and what should point to it. If the author cannot come up with three potential strong links to it, perhaps that means that some more general articles need to be written first, to establish context.

Those strong links need to be created, so part of creating a new article is editing three or more pages so they link to the new page.

For workgroup editors

Editors, perhaps assisted by some future automated tool, need to stay aware of orphaned, isolated, or walled material. Creating strong links to an article does not constitute substantial editing of the article; an editor can still nominate that article for Approval if the editor made changes to the article itself, or to articles linking to it, only to prevent orphaning.

For Citizens, and perhaps Indexers

In the process of reading articles, a Citizen may come across an article that is not strongly linked. If it is possible to create links that make sense, doing so on the spot is encouraged. Certainly, a lot of articles now in place don't meet the strong linking goal, because it wasn't a stated goal when the article was written.

????we could, perhaps, have people that look for such "weak" articles and try to fix them, in some cases requiring the creation of brief higher-level articles that link to a good entry point. Sometimes, this can be done by someone who is not a subject matter expert. In other cases, such expertise will be needed.

Open issues

• "Permanent stubs", a class of article that is legitimately isolated, because the only reason it exists is to have a "linkable definition". Such an article would be isolated but not orphaned