I must admit that I'm a little baffled as to why this template is considered "more elegant" than the wikipedia prefix. I find it much more natural for the article name to be the hyperlink instead of the cryptic (WP) that makes perfect sense to someone deeply immersed in wiki-speak, but not to many others. In addition, I think the tt font is annoying. Pardon my venting tone, and perhaps I'm missing something obvious here, but sometimes I think we get fancier than we need to. The Wikipedia prefix seems perfectly workable and clear for me... --CurtB 22:08, 19 November 2006 (PST)

Okay, so forget the comment above, whatever mood I was in that day.
There are two things that I'm uncomfortable with about the resulting formatted text.
  1. The hyperlink is small, which makes it a bit harder to hit than if the whole word or phrase was the hyperlink
  2. Perhaps a bigger deal for me, the link has a much different look/feel to the "normal" links (built by [[wikipedia:article name|article name]], which I think is confusing to the uninitiated user. Granted, this "issue" is probably unavoidable, since I expect that one of the primary motivations for creating the template(s) is to have them (wikipedia references) display in some way that is distinct from other references. But my concern is that it's just not that obvious to a new user what the heck is represented. That is, what will I get if I click on that little "wp"?
There is another issue which is sort of related to the gap above, and that's the fact that we're not consistent about usage from article to article. I think that contributes to a confusing situation. It's related to the above in the sense that, my discomfort has stopped me from adopting and promoting the template. But probably there will always be two fairly common schemes in usage...
Anyway, that's all the grumble. I actually support the idea of a unique wikipedia link "visual element", and the superscript "wp" works for me. I mostly just want the whole word/phrase to be part of the link. I'm kind of on the fence about the tt formatting. I guess the point is to make it clear what the link is with respect to. If the whole word/phrase is part of the hyperlink, perhaps the tt formatting isn't needed? I know that two links next to each other may be confusing (but NOT two wikipedia hyperlinks :-).
So the visual that I'm thinking of looks like: AustraliaWP.
Drop a response. --CurtB 08:10, 15 December 2006 (PST)
Sorry Curt - I didn't notice your earlier comment, of Nov 19.
I think you've understood the motive - having the link look different, so people know it's leading somewhere different. (Newbies in particular might end up on Wikipedia and not even know they've changed sites).
Yes, it's a little unfamiliar, but then a lot of things about Wikis are unfamiliar at first - such as redlinks, which confused the heck out of me, till I (much later) understood what wikis were about. This one at least shouldn't be too hard to work out (e.g. by experimentation). It's an issue, but not critical, in my mind.
I see the value in your idea of using the superscript but linking the whole word. But I'm concerned about the fact that it then looks like two links. Perhaps the superscript could be unlinked - AustraliaWP - but that seems odd. (It occurs to me that in mathematical terms, a subscript would be more appropriate - AustraliaWP or AustraliaWP... but it's not used in prose - in English, anyway - and it's less prominent and wouldn't work well here.)
As for being harder to hit... true, but it's bigger than the average footnote reference. I wouldn't have thought that we'd expect people to follow them often - they're just there if needed. Internal Appropedia links certainly should be easy, regular hyperlinks, but having a little superscript link for inline links to Wikipedia articles seem like a fair solution to me (though that's just my perspective - I don't dismiss the fact that it bothers you).
"If the whole word/phrase is part of the hyperlink, perhaps the tt formatting isn't needed?" This is true. Actually the different formatting is not strictly necessary even with only the WP linked... a little confusing, perhaps, but I don't think it's fatal. Context will often indicate what is linked. After all, footnotes also don't make it exactly clear which part of the text will be explained in the footnote. Also, depending on their browser and settings, the user may be able to see where the WP link goes (though this is not prominent enough to distinguish between Wikipedia and Appropedia articles, without the "WP").
Another alternative is to use a different color, but I don't think that achieves what we want.
So my current preference would be to remove the tt formatting, but still have only the WP linked. But I have an open mind - why don't you change it to how you like, and we see how that works? --Singkong2005 (now known as Chriswaterguy) · talk 03:24, 16 December 2006 (PST)

Wow... I guess I'm four years late to this discussion, but this whole template confused the heck out of me too.

Coming from Wikipedia, I'm used to interwiki links (done as [[wikipedia:blah]]) simply showing up as a lighter blue and I didn't realize Appropedia had its own way of doing this. The superscript "W" especially confused me: I first thought it was some sort of obscure double-caret symbol used for a special type of footnote, then I thought it was a bizarre Roman-numeral based numbering system, then after noticing that it went to Wikipedia, I still thought it was a formatting error (why wasn't the phrase itself linked?).

Only after tracking down the actual template and this discussion did I realize I'm not alone. Is this system still in use today? Should we continue using it instead of the standard interwiki links?

-Roger 01:25, 1 February 2010 (UTC)Reply[reply]

-- I changed the "W" in the superscript to "wikipedia." I felt the clarity of the template's usage superceded it's brevity in importance. Others in the discussion thread seem to agree. -Achannel 4/12/2011

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