Since this is the Summer of Love, in helping the newbies out I find myself linking to Wikipedia quite often (as they're usually woefully lacking in basic understandings of the topics they're asking about). Linking to these articles would be much more convenient (and I'd be able to fit more content into a comment) if there was a shorthand for Wikipedia links. The current syntax means I'm taking up 30 character plus the length of the article name: [](http://wikipedia.org/wiki/)
.
Usually the words I'd like to become a link also happen to be the article name. It would be extremely convenient if I could take advantage of this fact and make those words a link simply by enclosing them in [w:
and ]
(or something similar).
So when I want to link someone to the article on Stack Overflow, currently I have to do:
[Stack Overflow](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Overflow)
Under this proposed feature that could be shortened to:
[w:Stack Overflow]
I fully admit this shortcut is most useful in comments, but very much so when I'm trying to link to multiple articles, and help people in their understanding of various topics. Also, it might save a few keystrokes in Question/Answer posts.
[u:Chris S]
links to a user,[q:146274/175984]
to a question, and[a:146274/175984]
to an answer.[u:175984]
, names change a lot (while IDs don't)