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Linking Policy and Wikipedia

Link rot is an epidemic. Websites are owned by marketing people, who don’t consider whether you’ll still be able to link to their current stuff in 5 years. The Web needs an indirection layer, something that you can link to, that will always point to current information about any given topic, product, or service.

Turns out the Web already has that. It’s called Wikipedia. See how I used it there in that first link? And that last one?

So here’s my policy:

  • If what I’m linking to has a top-level domain, then I will link to it.
  • If I’m linking to someone’s words (say, a blog post or magazine article), then I will link to that.
  • Otherwise, I’m linking to Wikipedia.

I’m not the only one who links this way. It’s placed Wikipedia in quite an enviable position. I wonder how long Wikipedia will continue to exist without ads. Any bets?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 8:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “Linking Policy and Wikipedia”

  1. Chris Miller Says:
    March 17th, 2008 at 11:49 am

    I just realized that I was following that pattern too. Here’s a custom 404 page that should trigger a worn and familiar circuit in your brain: http://insubordinate.net/404.html

  2. stevex Says:
    March 18th, 2008 at 6:26 am

    Nice. :) Guru Meditation numbers are supposed to be an arcane way of saying what happened though, so to keep in that spirit it’d need to include the error code… something like #00000050.00000194 (where 0×50 is 80, for HTTP, and 0×194 is 404).

  3. S. J. Gunn Says:
    March 18th, 2008 at 2:13 pm

    Steve, saw your post on the Littermaid cat box. Check this out:

    http://grundlepod.blogspot.com/

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