[Wikipedia-l] list madness

[Daniel Mayer]

On Thursday 29 August 2002 03:56 pm, you wrote:
> is it just me or has anyone else noticed the sheer
> amount of lists that we have? running a title search
> for the word 'list' will come up with such bizarre
> pages as [[List of places and things named Oxford]].
>
> I know list can be usefull but isn't this going a bit too far?
> (especially that we've got a decent search function now).
> Shouldn't the lists be simply attached to the main article
> without creating a new page for each and every on of
> them?
>
> regards,
> [[list of people and things named WojPob]]

Long lists are not appropriate for encyclopedia articles (why force somebody 
on dial-up to download a 20 KB list just to read a 1 KB article?). Wikipedia 
is not paper and many almanac-like lists do add peripheral content to 
particular subjects. When a list in an encyclopedia article gets 
distractingly long it is then necessary to create a "list of" subarticle. 

These lists are almost always only linked from their parent article so I 
don't see what the fuss is about. On 
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Statistics I've already proposed 
that almanac-like entries (such as lists) be included in a separate total 
article count (I once didn't even consider lists to be articles but have 
since accepted the fact that this type of almanac-like info has always and 
will always be with wikipedia). 

If you don't like lists, then don't contribute to their creation or better 
yet make them more useful by adding some content to naked lists (that is; 
birth and death dates by names, major attributes, etc.). Different people 
contribute in different ways and it is interesting to sometimes see a list of 
biologists after reading the article on biologists -- the search function 
yields messy results for this type of thing. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS [[List of places and things named Oxford]] is a disambiguation page that 
is only linked from a disambiguation block in [[Oxford]]. I just gave it a 
better name; [[Oxford (disambiguation)]] (disambiguation pages is another 
thing I have proposed to treat differently in the total article count).