Is it useful/needed to include Wikipedia links for hardware information?

Question

I was looking at the review queue and I got to vote on this suggested edit. The author of the edit removed noise and fixed the uppercase of acronyms like "HP" (great modifications) but also included 3 links to Wikipedia pages related to the hardware the OP is using.

Now I feel a bit confused and I don't really know what to do. Peter has a very positive history of very valuable contributions on the network, especially on SU where he was also editor in chief. There is clearly a case of good faith and desire to provide a contribution, no doubts on that.

What confuses me is whether three links pointing to Wikipedia are really needed. This user is also a very active participant in the Wikipedia community, so it might be that his love for the project has lead him to add a bit too much links to it.

My points are:

• This is definitely not spam. But could it be considered a bit too much "affection" for Wikipedia by adding links that might not be relevant?
• Are those links actually relevant? Do they improve the post?
• Should these kinds of edits be:
  1. accepted without caring too much about them?
  2. encouraged because they provide useful background?
  3. rather rejected to avoid cluttering the post?

For Peter: I hope you don't feel bad at me for pointing out your edit, I am just trying to understand the rationale. Nothing personal here.

Answer 1

In my opinion, links should only be added if they are immediately relevant to the question, regardless of where the links point to (can be Wikipedia or Canonical or whatever that is most useful and relevant). Also, adding a hyperlink does in fact affect the readability of a post because it causes the hyperlinked text to be colored differently from the unhyperlinked text. For a post on the main site (but not the meta site), the hyperlinked text also gets underlined when you mouseover it. This means adding hyperlinks will draw attention to them, so we want to make sure the attention expended is worthwhile.

For this particular edit, the links to the Wikipedia articles for Ubuntu 14.04 and HP Pavilion notebooks are not immediately relevant to the question. Therefore, such links, when clicked, have drawn attention to information that is not useful and wastes time. The proposed Wikipedia links are therefore harmful to the post and the edit should be rejected if the addition of the Wikipedia links were the only modifications in the edit.

Unfortunately, we can't reject or accept parts of an edit. For this edit, I think the good from fixing grammar and punctuation and removing noise outweighs the bad from adding the Wikipedia links. Therefore, I would have chosen "Improve Edit" and then remove the Wikipedia links.

Answer 2

I would typically improve the edit by "removing the cruft" AKA deleting information that doesn't have a direct bearing on the question or answer. Related sources for an answer should be left as is. I think replacing an original dead link with an active one is a good idea.

I don't see the point in adding links to an edit unless they serve to support the original post or the edit you made.

Answer 3

• This is definitely not spam. But could it be considered a bit too much "affection" for Wikipedia by adding links that might not be relevant

Addition of links wasn't sole purpose of edition, he fixed grammar; they're rather bonus, not hurting the post, so if the editor likes it, why not?

• Are those links actually relevant? Do they improve the post?

In the particular case it's subjective (anybody not knowing HP here?). So, I'd approach from the opposite side: they doesn't harm the post.

• Should these kinds of edits be:
  1. accepted without caring too much about them?
  2. encouraged because they provide useful background?
  3. rather rejected to avoid cluttering the post?

That depends. If the linked edit would've made for sole purpose of adding links, I'd rather reject it, because it would add from little to no info to the post, and trivial edits are discouraged.

Another reject situation as if a post already has important links, like to bug-reports, blog posts, tutorials one used, etc; and the edition clutters available ones with those that didn't help much. As an upper bound situation imagine a post with every word linked to a dictionary.

In other cases, i.e. when edit was made for purposes of fixing (like grammar, formatting, etc), and links doesn't hurt to readability, it is fine to accept.

As for the fact that links are made specifically to Wikipedia — I doesn't see it as anything bad at all: in the end, it is an encyclopedia, the more that it is a non-commercial one.

Answer 4

Editor in chief at Superuser is a great accolade. That being said, it's always possible to learn something new, if only to avoid becoming complacent. The last new editing trick I learned was this one:

<!-- language: lang-none -->

Put this line before a code block followed by a blank line and it suppresses code highlighting. It's invisible by default, so it won't be visible on the screen if special formatting to make it visible is not added. The colors in code highlighting can be distracting if they don't serve the useful purpose of making the code easier to understand.

My suggestion is to take it easy on unnecessary links to Wikipedia hardware articles because they can be distracting too.

Answer 5

We seem to be over thinking the linking.

If an answer to a question is found on a website why not link it? I've been chastised for not including a summary of the link in case the website goes down in the future--which I've done going forward.

The only subconscious trepidation is a better link exists on page 50 of the google search but I only read as far as page 2--the next person posting an answer may include a link from page 50 making me look like an inferior researcher.

Because most of us are enthusiasts / volunteers, I hope we aren't overly judgmental on links others provided out of their sincerity to help.