Occasionally, a troper may be tempted when editing an article to change mentions of the name so that they form the WikiWord for the article, be it a trope or a work or something else. This is called Linking to an Article Within the Article, and it's generally held to be bad formatting. If you see this, please immediately undo the wiki word.
There are a number of reasons for this:
- It invokes the Department of Redundancy Department, and usually not in a humorous way.
- It can be confusing, as a reader may assume that it references another page rather than the same page.
- It wastes time as the page reloads.
- If it is a media page and there are other works with the same name it may be confused with a link to one of them.
- It may lead to unnecessary confusion and work if the name is changed or the page moved.
- This is especially the case on TLP
where the name of a proposed new trope can change without warning.
- This is especially the case on TLP
- Worst case scenario, it may lead to a Reality-Breaking Paradox and The End of the World as We Know It. And That's Terrible.
This also applies to examples. What work has the example, or the name of the trope the example has, should only be wiki worded the first time even if said again, like so:
Right:
- Big Bad: Emperor Evulz is the Big Bad of season 3 when he tries to Take Over the World, and returns as the Big Bad in season 5 when he tries to destroy the world.
Wrong:
- Big Bad: Emperor Evulz is the Big Bad of season 3 when he tries to Take Over the World, and returns as the Big Bad in season 5 when he tries to destroy the world.
The reason for this is that a huge number of circular links often get created when the wrongly formatted example is duplicated to the trope page. On any given trope page plagued with circular links, the majority can often be found in the examples instead of the description. Vice versa for duplication to work pages.
Circular links are especially bad when the link is a Pot Hole, since people have to hover over the link to figure out that they have no reason to click it. Even from a rhetorical standpoint, it's not clever, since it's essentially an observation that that thing we're talking about is — astoundingly — an example of the reason we brought it up in the first place.
Worst of all is where there's a Circular Link, a link to a redirect of the article (these are really hard to spot), guaranteeing that pretty much everyone will click it before realizing that they just got nowhere. This happens a lot when listing Internal Subtropes.
