Wikipedia: The Beautiful Incorporation of Hyperlinked Endnotes and Hot-Keyed Search Boxes
posted on 17 February 2011 | posted in
Computers
Out of all the millions of websites in the great forest that is the World Wide Web - from e-commerce websites to blogs - Wikipedia has to be my favorite amongst them. Wikipedia’s design is fairly straightforward, but it is a remarkably efficient structure for conveying encyclopedic information. One critical aspect is the use of internal links connecting sourced statements with their bibliographic references – endnotes at the bottom of the page. By keeping all this information on the same page, a user can simply click on the footnote reference mid-article and immediately be taken to the bibliography, where the relevant reference is helpfully highlighted. After that, one needs only to hit the backspace key to return to their spot earlier in the article – no navigation required. Furthermore, unlike almost every search box I’ve ever seen, users can simply hit ALT+Shift+F, and then they can immediately begin typing in the search box. This is extremely efficient for those of us who are fond of using keyboard shortcuts to increase our speed. And when you’re racing through Wikipedia assimilating information with a passion, this is a great function to speed-up the process.
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