The trouble with the Web is that like everything else, per Sturgeon’s Revelation, 90% of it is crap. In particular, a lot of institutional sites are pathetic self-serving fluff served up in anodyne marketing-speak with horrible URIs that are apt to vanish. Linking to the Wikipedia instead is tempting, and I’ve succumbed a lot recently. In fact, that’s what I did for the Canada Line. After all, the train is still under construction and there’s no real reason to expect today’s links to last; on top of which, the Line’s own site is mostly about selling the project to the residents and businesses who (like me) are getting disrupted by it, and the taxpayers who (like me) are paying for it. Wikipedia entries, on the other hand, are typically in stable locations, have a decent track record for outliving transient events, are pretty good at presenting the essential facts in a clear, no-nonsense way, and tend to be richly linked to relevant information, including whatever the “official” Web site might currently happen to be.

why linking to wikipedia often wins over pathetic originals

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