Thoughts on New Duplicate Links Policy

Wiki Discussion
1

Back in April 2025, a poll was run regarding a new policy, where the general consensus became that links can reappear once per major section only.

However, whether it be due to people being busy post-fork or the poll not being widespread enough, there were only 18 votes and 8 replies.

From what I've seen recently, this new policy that was implemented along with the new Manual of Style seems to have been very unknown, and very few people have actually tried to implement it, with the majority still making edits following the previous policy.

After asking about it, it seems like there are a lot of differing viewpoints on the matter, so I've made this discussion for people to give their thoughts on the policy, with this time hopefully getting more traction and without the dangers of the poll feature.

2

I prefer the current rule of once per major section only. It's what Wikipedia uses and I feel it strikes a decent balance between ease of use and not coating an article entirely blue.

3

I prefer the current one because people tend to skip sections when reading. The reader uses links for navigation, if they want to read the In battle section first we shouldn't make their experience worse by not linking things that were mentioned in the Main story section. Or worse, things that were linked in the introduction can no longer be linked in the main body of the article.

Why does Seam's page not link to Jevil anywhere in the section talking about their history with Jevil? Why does Seam's page not link to Shadow Crystal in the section talking about how they explain the purpose of Shadow Crystals? Why does Tenna's article not link to Mike in the section talking about Tenna's relationship with Mike? I don't think there is a good reason for this.

4

I do not think having multiple links, starting with each main section, will improve the quality of this wiki. Multiple links in general do not encourage page movement. It just facilitates link fatigue, making the reading experience worse. Seeing lots of duplicate links in a row makes my reading experience worse, at the very least. It's not only tiring, it makes it more difficult for me to scan in the sea of blue for distinct concepts, and makes that color feature less helpful for me.

Regarding Wikipedia's standards:
We are not Wikipedia; Wikipedia is a good standard to follow, but following them 100% to a T is unreasonable. Sometimes it makes sense to diverge from their standards if it improves the quality of this wiki.

Regarding the usefulness of each section having a link:
When I watched a friend visit a specific wiki page, this is what I witnessed. They read from top to bottom, by scrolling downward. Sure, some sections they glossed over more quickly than others, but that was a conscious decision on their part. They didn't jump between random sections, as reading from top to bottom is the most common way. (Plus, they couldn't find the table of contents to jump to certain sections even if they wanted to, though that's another issue entirely.)

Yes, it's true maybe the wiki itself or another person links a specific section, but just like jumping halfway into a book, it doesn't make sense to cater the content of each chapter for those people, they should go to the start, or scroll up, to see what they've missed. They will survive.

Some pages have extremely short main sections. Like, actually one-sentence length. When this occurs, and the reader reach a new section, because of this rule, they get immediately bombarded by a new link.

Let's look at Goulden Sam's page for an example. We have a two-sentence intro, a four-sentence profile section, and then the main story section (which is considerably longer). With this rule, we link Card Castle 3 paragraphs in a row. This feels extremely unreasonable to me. I just (theoretically) saw Card Castle being linked several sentences ago.

There's a rule about item and song pages being exempt because they are so short. I agree as a whole that those particular pages are short. But what happens when other pages that aren't related to items/songs are equally as short? Where does the benchmark for "short" start and end? Since it's all arbitrary, do we use the longest or shortest of the item and song pages as the benchmark? How does this figure into other pages? We have some very very short NPC pages (pair of eyes and Vegetoid come to mind), do they get a free pass too? I don't like when there's just random exceptions to a rule, especially if they are unstated (like in this case for anything that isn't an item or song page), that can sometimes indicate there's a problem with the existing guideline.

5

I agree with HylianAngel's sentiment here of not needing multiple links. I do think having too many duplicate links ends up cluttering the page and add more to the overall size as well. I wouldn't want an entire page being filled with multiple repeated links as it would basically make it harder to view certain aspects of a specific page.