[[User:Thinboy00]] wrote:
A merge often happens when
there is /insufficient/ content. If the content hints at
nonnotability, it is usually deleted. We should better encourage
unmerging (is that a word...?), and create a /simple, easy to use/
system/gui for doing so. However, merging itself is not evil. If an
"article" (a stub) is two sentences long, it makes more sense to group
it with related information. That way, we (as a community) don't need
to maintain an increased number of articles (yes, they still exist,
they still take up space, but we don't need to protect them from
vandalism etc., we don't need to update them as e.g. external links
change, and a lot more), and the reader gets to read more than a few
sentences. We presume that by entering a topic, they wanted
information about it (or they wanted to edit it, but at least /some/
will want to read). Ergo, if there's only a few sentences on it
available, they will (probably) want related/more information/external
links, which a list provides.
I'm not sure I really see the improvement though. If anything, these big
list articles are much harder to organize, edit, and keep decent than
smaller, focused articles are. As far as I can tell the main impetus for
them is really a feeling that not-particularly-famous characters in some
not-particularly-famous universe don't really "deserve" their own
articles, and that merging them all into one somehow reduces clutter.
I'd guess that sort of embarrassment about articles on topics deemed not
particularly noteworthy is why it comes up almost exclusively with
fictional characters---you don't see anyone pushing to merge 500 minor
Roman consuls into a big article like [[List of Roman Republic consuls
about whom history has recorded no more than about 4 sentences worth of
information]], or lots of very small towns in Minnesota into [[List of
Minnesota towns with fewer than 100 people]]. They just each get their
own, short article. This is more convenient for a number of reasons; for
example, the Roman consuls who lived in the 3rd century BC can be
conveniently found via [[Category:3rd century BC people]], which would
be hard to do if they were all in a big list.
-Mark