User:Howard C. Berkowitz/Strong Articles

Template:TOC-right 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 be strong, 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.

Role of the techniques in work planning

Hypothetically, if one did not know a specific case or policy, such as a topical matter of an Israeli detention of a Palestinian, or a Russian detention of a Chechen, one might be able to find the topic by starting at a "law" or "military" page, or perhaps name of country, and work one's way down to a page that gets to the subject of interest.

Remember that a Related Articles page almost certainly will start out Strong, and is a logical anchor point for more specific articles. When one has a specific article and is not sure how to put it into the system, a basic method may to start at a Workgroup or Core Article page, and then work down, perhaps creating Related Articles pages, even without having an associated full articles, until there are reasonable links to the specific topic.

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
• Explicit indexing link, is not easy to explain and there may not be many. It may be that this sort of thing is rare enough that it might get the equivalent of Approval on a case-by-case basis.
• Are there cases where adequately strong links could come out of tables or lists, because a table or list is a reasonable way to structure the navigation information? If so, what would define "reasonable"?
• Is there reason to have a class of volunteers that looks 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? Perhaps this might be a project for cleaning up old, weakly linked articles. Sometimes, this can be done by someone who is not a subject matter expert. In other cases, such expertise will be needed.