On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 7:09 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)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