If you try making the article more succinct, Carcharoth, you may well find editors
reverting
you and claiming that you are "deleting reliably sourced material" and censoring
what you
don't like. What policy would you cite in response?
In a way that is a new problem. Most of our policies are arguably still biased against
such deletions, reflecting a time when many articles were stubs and we were glad to have
any material at all. We have no policy or guideline arguing for succinctness (except
the COATRACK essay perhaps). People are traditionally free to write as much as they
like about anything that has taken their fancy. We have an incredibly detailed article
on
toilet paper orientation and other obscure subjects that would never make it into a
regular
encyclopedia. "Due weight" only applies to subtopics within an article, not to
notable topics
as such.
If the bulk of something is cut in an article, you just go and create a sub-article,
pointing to
the 100 sources that have written about it, and create an 8,000-word article about
"tail",
while "dog" remains at 500 words.
The trouble is, this in-depth coverage of obscure topics is also part of what people
like
about Wikipedia. That it can be and is abused for activism, just by sheer weight of
coverage, is obvious. I just don't see an easy solution. We have no policy that an
editor
must not use every last source available, and I don't think instituting one is
feasible.
A.
--- On Sat, 4/6/11, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:From: Carcharoth
<carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] BLP extension suggestion
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Saturday, 4 June, 2011, 23:57
On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 6:51 PM, David Levy <lifeisunfair(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I see no material distinction preventing us from
documenting the
matter in a balanced fashion.
The trouble is, the article is overwritten. This is not a phenomenon
restricted to this article, it is common in many "political" or
"activist" articles, where some editors try to use *every* source out
there to write an article several pages long (sometimes in an attempt
to avoid arguments about what to include and what not to include, at
other times maybe just by being carried away, or simply by not wanting
or knowing how to exercise judgment on what to include and when less
is more).
I repeat, a shorter article (if done to high standards) would be *just
as balanced* and would send the message that this is not a topic that
really needs lots written about it. One of the fundamental elements of
editorial judgment is to decide what to leave out and how to
*summarise* parts of the topic rather than drawing in everything that
has been written about the topic.
You see many FA-level articles where the main writer has read numerous
sources and made a judgment (based on the proportions of coverage
given by the main source) on where and how to summarize. That needs
doing here.