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Is editing technology names to link to corresponding Wikipedia articles useful?

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There is a particular user - a prolific editor with close to 50000 edits - who I frequently notice has edited inline links to Wikipedia into posts. For example, his most recent page of Revisions in his activity history includes editing the Wikipedia links into each of the following sentences/phrases:

From Apache version check fails:

Platform: Linux (SUSE)

From Where are my Windows server Subversion files located?:

I have just set up Subversion on Windows Server 2003

From Compiling libapache2-svn for Apache 2.4.4:

I want to use Apache 2.4.4 with SVN on Ubuntu server 12.04 (Precise Pangolin).

From https://stackoverflow.com/a/18118562/1709587:

I've asked Ondřej Surý on Launchpad to add Subversion to his Apache PPA.

From Pathfinding 2D Java game?:

I'm currently writing a very basic Java game based on the idea of Theme Hospital.

Are these edits, in the view of the community, welcome?

Personally, I mostly find these links to be a nuisance. I generally avoid Wikipedia as a technical source because I find it is usually overly waffly, focused more on history than on technical documentation, and too likely to have technical errors for me to trust it. (Of course, your judgements may vary.) Additionally, I think that many of the things that this user's edits turn into Wikipedia links either have much more natural link targets or needn't have links at all. For instance:

  • SUSE has an official homepage
  • I think that close to 100% of readers know what Windows Server 2003 is without needing an explanatory link
  • Similarly, it's unclear to me what value somebody reading a question about using Apache on Ubuntu 12.04 could possibly get from a link to the section about Ubuntu 12.04 on Wikipedia. What's such a link for?
  • Both the Launchpad and PPA links go to surprising destinations; I would expect them to respectively take me to the Launchpad homepage and the PPA, respectively. Isn't making them Wikipedia links misleading here?

Pretty much the only link that strikes me as perhaps being useful is the Theme Hospital one, and only because the following things are all true in that particular case:

  • There exists no official homepage to link to
  • Theme Hospital a non-technical topic; people following a link for more information just need a layman's summary of what it is, not any kind of technical explanation
  • The Wikipedia article contains all the information that somebody reading the post needs in its first sentence

(And even then, the utility is limited - a Google search returns the Theme Hospital Wikipedia page as the first result.)

When linking to information about technologies, on the other hand, it seems to me that Wikipedia is a fairly unhelpful source. I'm happy to find inline links in posts to official homepages, official documentation, or to third-party technical documentation of decent quality (like MDN) - such links are useful to me when verifying claims made in the post or as starting points for my own research. But why, exactly, would I take a tangent from reading a question about compiling Apache on Ubuntu to read what Wikipedia has to say about Ubuntu 12.04? That seems like an infodump that the reader is unlikely to want or to find relevant - and if I do want to gather such general knowledge, I can Google for it myself.

However, as with the last occasion that I systematically disagreed with many of the edits of a single editor, I concede that this is all subjective; perhaps others find value in these links that I do not. So, I ask Meta: should the user who is editing in these Wikipedia links desist from doing so, or are they helpful?


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