Overworked (overly Pavlovian?) at USCHO.com?

This just in from uscho.com. Everything in bold is a hot link in the original story. Unfortunately the Union in Seymour College Union links to the Dutchmen of Kris Mayotte fame. Actually, the erstwhile coach took over running Brock State's student union called Seymour College Union.

[url
http://www.uscho.com/news/id,12282/DickinsonReturnsToBrockportBench.html[/url]]
BROCKPORT, N.Y. — After a one-year leave of absence, Brian Dickinson will return to the Brockport bench for the 2006-07 season. The announcement was made Wednesday by athletics director Lin Case.

Dickinson”We are pleased to have Brian return to our coaching staff,” said Case. “He has a wealth of experience and is an asset to the hockey program here at Brockport.”

Dickinson had taken a season off from his coaching duties overseeing the general day-to-day operations of the Seymour College Union at Brockport. He will also resume his duties as the manager of the Tuttle North Ice Arena.

Dickinson, who began his coaching career at Buffalo State, was behind the Brockport bench from 1996-97 until 2004-05, amassing a 54-140-16 record.

James Eccles, who was an interim coach this season at Brockport, was 4-20-1. Eccles served as an assistant coach to Dickinson for two seasons.

Bill, this happens a lot. My theory is that they've got a computer program that automatically puts in the links at the first mention of any school name. I'm pretty sure I've seen it link some person named Curry to the ECAC NE program.

If a routine autolinks for you, Step II is that humans should check the web pages for commonsense. Plus in this story, one other item was most likley handlinked, the first bolding below ...

Dickinson had taken a season off from his coaching duties overseeing the general day-to-day operations of the Seymour College Union at Brockport. He will also resume his duties as the manager of the Tuttle North Ice Arena.

... plus it's Seymour "College Union" not "Union College." On the other hand, when you jump to the first link, an August 2005 story about the coach stepping aside, it too has the same reference to the college union and the same link to the Dutchmen's hockey records year by year. Either the auto-linker is consistent, or somebody cut and pasted text ("from his coaching duties" and link in one fell swoop.

Of course, people who live around glass websites shouldn't throw stones. We get our share of errors, too. (Right now, if smart quotes and em dashes aren't changed to straight quotes and dual hyphens, they show up as question marks. That's supposed to be an automated task in the production system and isn't.)

The real answer most likely is not enough people trying to keep up with a huge flow of pages.

It's an auto-linker. as you term it, Bill. It just looks for the word "Union", because how often does an article actually write "Union College." Well, I dunno how often, but not all the time.

Yes, they should have a human double check it, but they clearly don't/can't do that all the time.