Friends forevermore
The problem with this is that the point of the Understatement cleanup is that it's a sarcasm trope. Making Understatement potholes display as plain text would give no indication that it's an understatement, even to desktop users who can ordinarily see the target of potholes.
I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.
An understatement needs no special marking to be an understatement. It either is one or it is not one. All the special marking in the world will not change this.
This is the whole complaint, here. If you have to tell people it is sarcasm, the sarcasm isn't working. We cannot use link-text to cure Sarcasm Blindness.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. — H.L. Mencken
Friends forevermore
Having it show up as a link makes it more obvious it's sarcasm, even if the link is misuse.
I had a dog-themed avatar before it was cool.
Lost in Space
Like many other wiki memes, potholing our own (supposed) cleverness is little more than masturbation.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
I'm against using tech solutions for cultural issues— Wikis shouldn't be authoritarian like that
Hoping for some sort of "wisdom of the crowds" to accomplish something hasn't worked, obviously. Are you suggesting a solution of some sort?
Shaping the culture has to be done. It doesn't just emerge.
edited 5th Nov '15 9:39:10 PM by eyebones
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. — H.L. Mencken
Came up in discussion of yet another Understatement purge:
The manual labor should wait a bit. It would be a fairly simple job to provide the parser with a blacklist of strings never to form into a free-link. For example, "understatement" bracketed with any other text would not form a link, yet would still form a link when curly-braced.
The text in the brackets other than the blacklisted word would still appear. It would just be that no link would be formed. You could think of the blacklist as the "Will Not Pothole" list.
Much, much less work to build than a crew would expend bruising their fingers for hours and hours.
edited 4th Nov '15 9:05:18 AM by eyebones
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. — H.L. Mencken