One unexpected aspect of digital publishing is the increasing misuse of links. Instead of explaining something, writers are increasingly turning to hyperlinks, saying, in other words, that I don’t need to explain this term – you can look it up for yourself. Let me explain, and give some examples of why this can become a problem.
This practice has become increasingly frequent in Wikipedia articles, particularly in the starting definitions, and has spread to much writing on the Web. Here is an example, from a recent LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog:
When people think about scientific misconduct, they picture fabricated datasets, invented experiments, manipulated images. Fallen stars such as Francesca Gino at Harvard come to mind. They are cast as science’s villains, and their downfalls make for compelling headlines.
Who is Francesca Gino? You could always look up the reference, but surely that takes away the point of referring to someone or something. I am reading this text so that it is intelligible when I read it without looking anywhere else.
Wikipedia follows this practice with enthusiasm: the more links, the better, you feel at times. Because Wikipedia has also adopted the habit of automatically adding cross-references to every term that has its own headword, a definition in Wikipedia can become a pattern of black and blue colouring:
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex elicited by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual’s history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual’s current motivational state and controlling stimuli. [Wikipedia, accessed 2 Feb 2026]
If I looked up this term because I didn’t know what it meant, I would be none the wiser by reading this. The problem is the use of terms that require technical knowledge to understand, without any explanation in situ. I don’t think we should expect readers to have to check six linked terms without explanation in order to comprehend the term “behaviorism”.
Links can be used sensibly. This is a good example, again from Wikipedia. This article begins with three sentences, all of them immediately intelligible:
Stroke is a medical condition in which poor blood flow to a part of the brain causes cell death.[5] There are two main types of stroke: ischemic, due to lack of blood flow, and hemorrhagic, due to bleeding.[5] Both cause parts of the brain to stop functioning properly.[5] [accessed 30 March 2026]
Definitions too technical and complicated
The fundamental reference principle is that terms should be defined using words no more technical than the term itself (see the principles of reference definition). This is of course a rough-and-ready rule, but it means that you don’t overload the initial description with words that the user will probably have to look up. I could define a horse as a quadruped, but it would be better for most users if Ii defined it as having four legs. In this entry,
Buddhism […] is an Indian religion and philosophybased on teachings attributed to the Buddha, a śramaṇa and religious teacher who lived in the 6th or 5th century BCE. [Wikipedia, accessed 30 March 2026]
The person looking up the definition of Buddhism is very unlikely to know what a “sramana movement”. You could argue that all the links in Wikipedia show the content when the cursor hovers over them, but that doesn’t, I think, excuse the laziness of simply referring users elsewhere.
This problem is not restricted to Wikipedia. The Oxford Dictionary of Geology (Michael Allaby), for example, defines basalt as follows:
basalt A dark-coloured, fine-grained, *extrusive, *igneous rock composed of *plagioclase feldspar, *pyroxene, and *magnetite, with or without *olivine, and containing not more than 53 wt. % SiO2. Many basalts contain *phenocrysts of olivine, plagioclase feldspar and pyroxene.
The problem is when you look up a related term such as “extrusive”, it is defined in the same dictionary as follows:
extrusive Applied to all ejected material of volcanic origin. The sense applies to *lavas and flows, rather than to *pyroclastic rocks.
Wikipedia’s entry for basalt has similar problems:
basalt an aphanitic (fine-grained) extrusive igneous rock formed from the rapid cooling of low-viscosity lava rich in magnesium and iron (mafic lava) exposed at or very near the surface of a rocky planet or moon. More than 90% of all volcanic rock on Earth is basalt.
This is poor. The definition is too complex and requires too much looking up to be understood. There are too many links: 13 links in 45 words! Better is that the term aphanitic is both linked but also glossed, so intelligible in context (fine-grained).
The same problem applies when you follow links in Wikipedia, for example, “extrusive”, which actually links to an entry for “extrusive rock”:
Extrusive rock refers to the mode of igneous volcanic rock formation in which hot magma from inside the Earth flows out (extrudes) onto the surface as lava or explodes violently into the atmosphere to fall back as pyroclastics or tuff. In contrast, intrusive rock refers to rocks formed by magma which cools below the surface.
In this case, the cross reference doesn’t quite apply. Better would be to use the term extrusive with the gloss “ejected into the atmosphere”.
Let’s compare this with the Google AI Overview version:
Basalt is a dark, fine-grained, extrusive igneous rock formed from rapidly cooled, magnesium- and iron-rich lava, making it the most common volcanic rock on Earth, forming the ocean floor and shield volcanoes.
This is quite remarkable. Although this represents my survey of just one definition, Google’s AI overview provides the best of the three definitions of this word – it’s certainly more readable. It could be further improved, but it’s an improvement on what humans have written. Here is my suggestion for an initial definition of basalt:
basalt a dark-coloured and fine-grained, rock, the most common type of rock that is extruded (released into the air) from volcanoes. More than 90% of all volcanic rock on Earth is basalt.
I’m not saying that Wikipedia should not contain all the technical terms, but that those terms should be placed further down the entry, following the “onion-skin” technique: define the term simply, then define it again in more technical terms, then again in more technical terms, if necessary as appropriate for the concept. I can’t claim any originality for this technique; it was in use by World Book Encyclopedia over 50 years ago, and was probably in use before then. But if something works well, why not continue to use it? And if genAI defines terms so well, perhaps we should use it when drafting any new reference content?
Leave a Reply