Template talk:Book
Linking to book entries
I believe it is useful to provide links for cited books if they already exist in the database. This can be done for journal articles and patents as well. I have so far found these ways to accomplish this:
Automatic linking
MediaWiki can check if a page exists with the #ifexist function. The great advantage of this is that the user only uses the title parameter and the corresponding entry is linked automatically (no link is displayed if such entry doesn't exist). The problem is that this function is expensive and may put unneeded stress on the server if used at scale. This is currently experimentally implemented as of April 2022.
Manual linking
The above behavior can be reproduced manually by the user by introducing a wikientry field and some conditional logic. The disadvantage of this is that the user has to spend more time when citing, and this is not optimal. I also couldn't technically achieve this because I couldn't escape double brackets in the code (requires templates such as !(().
Hard linking
We can always just make the title hard link to an entry, even if it doesn't lead to anywhere and displays a red link. We may resort to this solution if nothing else works sufficiently. The question is: do people usually cite books that should be available as wiki entries or not?
Panos Alevropoulostalk 07:35, 6 April 2022 (EDT)
