[WikiEN-l] Is Merging Worse than Deletion?

[Anthony]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 4:59 PM, [[User:Thinboy00]]
<thinboy00+wikipedialist at gmail.com> wrote:
>  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.

This is, generally, the essence of the argument for merging, and I
find it completely without merit.  I have on more than one occasion
found myself on one of these megamerged pages, and each time I would
have preferred a two sentence stub which linked to the list page.
Either way all I'm really getting is two sentences of useful
information, but at least with the stub my browser loads quicker and I
don't have to search for those two sentences.  You say "the reader
gets to read more than a few sentences", but if the rest of those
sentences are about something other than what I'm searching for,
that's not a positive thing.

I don't buy that it's easier to maintain these megamerged pages.  If
anything I would think it would be easier to hide vandalism among the
more frequently edited megapage - plus external links still need to be
maintained, what links here stops working, categories don't work,
editing is harder, etc.  Would it be easier to maintain
[[Arthuriana]], [[Crustaceana]], and [[Infection and Immunity]] if we
merged them together into [[List of minor scientific journals]]?