Defining Chained Sinkholes

I recently came upon a situation where a valid Pothole was removed as it was considered part of a "chained sinkhole". However, it was not up against another pothole or sinkhole. (It was a pluralized trope name which is not considered a sinkhole.) I took this to ATT to get clarification on just what qualifies as a "chained sinkhole" and was directed to start a thread here.

To me, the example of a chained sinkhole given on the sinkhole page is an obvious case:

The links are irrelevant, inappropriate, and all run together making it impossible at a glance to know where each one starts and ends.

However, the case that brought this up was (from The Elder Scrolls):

Thalmor is appropriately potholed to A Nazi by Any Other Name as it clarifies to an unfamiliar reader what the Thalmor are and that page contains a much larger write-up about them. Agent Provocateur is the name of a trope (just pluralized) and thus, not even a pothole (and especially not a sinkhole).

I've seen other cases of similar changes in the past and I believe that a clearer definition of "chained sinkhole" is in order. Perhaps, if we come up with something here, it could be added to the Sinkhole writeup on the subject.

Thoughts?

Edited by BeerBaron on Jan 26th 2024 at 8:31:51 AM

I'm inclined to let that one slide: while it is a chained link, the second one does use the actual trope name.

Second choice would be to unlink Thalmor.

My first thought is that there is no way to tell how many links there are at a glance. It could be one, two, three, or even more. In isolation each link is fine, but when chained together it's a problem. I too would go with not linking the word "Thalmor" - if people need to know what that means they can just look at the rest of the page.

Yeah, I think it's just best to unlink the character's name. It's not necessarily a sinkhole but character name potholes in general are useless most of the time. In my experience from cleanup they're rarely ever there for a reason.

And I do think that a scenario where there's an unbroken chain of blue links is technically a sinkhole even if they're not all potholes. The issue isn't the formatting but the confusion caused by so many links mashed together .

While that specific example is how this came up most recently, I'm less concerned with that directly than trying to clarify what a chained sinkhole is, per the ATT thread I linked to. (I already adjusted the wording to separate the pothole from the trope name in that entry).

If we want to redefine a chained sinkhole as "any chained together potholes that aren't trope or work names", we can. It just doesn't say that on the sinkhole page. The goal here is to try to clarify just what a chained sinkhole is so we can get that updated for future reference.

Edited by BeerBaron on Jan 26th 2024 at 3:11:39 PM

As for that example, it is a bit weird because depending on context you could also just turn Agent Provocateur into agent provocateurs (shouldn't it be agents provocateurs anyway? Lost an S somewhere) because the trope name is also a common phrase, and it seems... weirder to keep the wiki word link to 'description of normal phrase' but remove the actual clarifying pothole.

Two blue links in sequence is not bad, especially since only one is a pothole and the other is a direct trope name, but it's infinitely preferable to not have sequential blue links in the first place. It's good to encourage a writing form that leans towards breaking up the links not just for formatting but also tends to be much clearer and self-explanatory language.

Less pressing, but still related, would also be to dissuade editors from flat [[character - character trope]] links unless it is clearly implied in the example write up (ie Even Evil Has Standards: Of all people BOB draws the line at kicking puppies vs. Cool Car: Bob has a classic corvette). Reminds me of someone once blue-linking a dozen references to The Kirk every time Kirk was mentioned in the Star Trek (2009) page.

Edited by EmeraldSource on Jan 26th 2024 at 8:01:15 AM

^ "...it's infinitely preferable to not have sequential blue links in the first place."

That's what I'm going to start doing anyway just to avoid situations like this, but I think it would be wise to expand the definition on the Sinkhole page to make it clear.

I can write something up and submit it to a mod (or whever the process is for updating administrivia pages) if we want that to be the case. But are there any objections to that idea? Are there any situations where we need to have two blue links together?