[WikiEN-l] Extended Articles/Subpages

[phoebe ayers]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 7:09 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've made some noise in this direction in the past, but I'm working on
>  a proper proposal to this effect that I think will really help fix
>  some of our deletionism/mergism issues in a way that both preserves
>  the unique content we have and keeps articles clean and informative.
>
>  I have a version of this proposal at [[User:Phil Sandifer/Extensions]]
>  that I invite people to hammer at. Once I have it in more detail I
>  intend to take it to the Village Pump.
>
>  ==Purpose==
>
>  Wikipedia, as we often note, is not paper. But Wikipedia is
>  fundamentally organized like paper - individual articles are still
>  linear stretches of text that are organized, essentially, for
>  printability. And that's good - the idea of an encyclopedia article
>  is, structurally, linear. But it does lead to problems with a lot of
>  information that is accurate, informative, and seems to be viewed as
>  valuable by our readers. This information often does not fit in well
>  with the linear structure of articles, and the system of sub-articles
>  leads to mixed results (as evidenced by waves of deletionism, mergism,
>  etc)

I would only worry about it becoming unclear what went in the "main"
article versus the "appendices" -- one man's cruft is another's
treasure. But, this would ideally have the effect of making articles
*a lot* more readable, as appendicy-type material was cut out to a
separate page. I would support it.

I just discovered the articles in this category :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Bibliographies_by_subject

These sorts of bibliographies would make *ideal* appendices off their
main article. As it is, they're a little unwieldy as articles. But
imagine, if every good or even half-way decent article had an
associated "bibliography" tab, along with "appendices" and the main
article... that would be pretty cool.

-- phoebe