Open link
From eg
An open link is a link, appearing by default as red text in mediawiki, to a page that does not exist.
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[edit] streamline vocabulary
All open links are not invitations to write an article, any article now. To assume so is to lead to a large number of low quality articles written in a rush by people who don't care.
An open link can be filled quickly with obvious definitions sometimes but this is not often advisable:
The main purpose of opening a link is to signal to other users that you consider this terminology to be standard and important not to vary from when discussing a related phenomena. In other words, to invite more open links on that concept.
[edit] leaving them open
Links can remain open for a good long while without harm. A shift to the CSS to make them less annoying than red links would help. When there is a specific idiom involved as above it is more important to fill it in than otherwise, unless it's easy to find the definition somewhere online with a quick google search.
A reasonable maximum number of open links at any one time may be set, or a reasonable amount of time devoted to closing them, if required. For instance, closing four or five per day would be not that difficult for experienced users.
Mosts wikis leave links open until it becomes clear that definitions are needed... the first person who gets stuck without knowing the definition should probably put one in to provoke a proper definition.
[edit] numbers of links
No one should be afraid of open links in a wiki. New wikis often have up to 30% open links, mature ones as much as 10-15% (compared to number of pages total), and even in very mature ones like Wikipedia with 850,000 articles you still find a few. It's no tragedy. NOT linking recurring concepts and ending up with things acquiring different names on unintended parallel pages is a disaster however:
[edit] policy
A recommended wiki policy for open links would be to very strongly prefer to link to it and increase the number of links to it, if mentioning any concept even remotely similar. That avoids the tyranny of small differences in definitions or terminology.
