User talk:AndyZ/peerreviewer/guide

Confusion over date formatting[edit]

The current "contxt" section says the following:

Per Wikipedia:Context and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), months and days of the week generally should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.

This has confused at least one conscientious editor who believed this meant that full dates (e.g., [[January 15]], [[1970]]) should be unlinked. I've also noticed a lot of articles recently in which editors have deliberately removed the year links from full dates, probably due to a misleadingly narrow reading of the policy. (For those who think this makes sense, remember that users can choose arrangements like "2001 January 15" or "2001-01-15" that depend on having the year linked as well in full-date text.)

Given that bots don't cite the specific problem instances (which I imagine would be incredibly complex to implement and yield very verbose recommendations), any confusion can cause earnest editors to inadvertently detract from instead of improve the article.

I know you want these messages to be concise, but this date-linking distinction is a common confusion that we'd be well-advised to avoid. I'm not bold enough at the moment to change someone's bot data, but might I suggest:

Per Wikipedia:Context and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), days of the week, standalone months, and month-year combinations should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.

It'd be nice to make clear that month-date and month-date-year combinations generally should be linked, but I realize that starts to get complicated (explaining why, expressing all the common orders, excepting ranges, etc.). I'm hoping that adding "standalone" and listing the three commonly unnecessarily linked combos is sufficient to better imply the missing cases that should be linked. Thanks. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:49, 2 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Underlinking[edit]

@AndyZ: I don't see the recommendation that articles should be 3% links in MOS:UNDERLINK and would humbly suggest that this parameter be removed or reduced. It might be helpful to take an audit of link counts in recently passed featured articles to come up with a better number. Qono (talk) 16:18, 21 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]