[WikiEN-l] Is Merging Worse than Deletion?

[Anthony]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I'll limit myself to fiction articles, since that's where I've seen
>  the worst effects, though I'd love to hear from people who edit in
>  other areas. [[List of characters in Gilmore Girls]] was the target of
>  a wealth of merges of characters, such that no characters in the show
>  have individual articles anymore. And, indeed, the old character
>  articles were crappy in-universe messes of the sort we want to clean up.
>
There are a number of problematic *types* of merges, and I think
you've hit on one of them.  To my mind it never makes sense to
redirect an instance of something to a list.  Certainly not an article
which clearly designates itself as a list, and more arguably not to
those listy articles whose title doesn't explicitly call itself a
list.

Of course, I see lists more as navigation tools than as articles in
themselves, whereas the standard practice seems to mix articles and
lists together.  Surely it's in large part due to the fact that making
lists is much easier than making an article which provides an overview
of the topic.  I also think the nature of wiki-collaboration leads to
this type of article development.  So it's probably a difficult
problem to fix.

On the other hand, I just hit random page a dozen or so times and
couldn't find any instances of these list-like articles.  So I don't
think it's for a large percentage of articles, though I do suspect a
sample weighted by article traffic would show a bigger problem.

And then there are articles like [[YouTube]], which is almost the
opposite problem (not enough merging - there are two "sections" which
consist entirely of ''Main article: [[whatever]]'').  Although, viewed
differently, maybe it's the same problem - lack of synthesis.