At 11:39 AM 3/6/2010, David Goodman wrote:
>We will never solve the problem of structuring--different
>encyclopedias at various times have done it quite opposite.
That's a non sequitur. The solved the problem. Differently.
> (Some
>French encyclopedias have even consisted of 5 or 6 very long volume
>length articles, divided in an elaborate scheme to a number of
>subsections. Recall that the print Brittanica for many years was
>divided into two separate parts, one with long articles, one with
>short ones--and with many subjects having a different article in each
>section.
I have that encyclopedia, it was brilliant. The next step was
hypertext. Wikipedia didn't adopt a layered hypetext model, but a
flat model, which then does not allow a notability hierarchy, only an
all-or-nothing decision, more or less. Either a separate article or
inclusion as a section in an article (or item in a list) or no
inclusion at all.
Part of this was a decision not to allow subpages. Using a subpage
structure would allow a top-level page on a topic that would require
high notability and stable and broad consensus, with the notability
level being enough to justify the attention that it takes to gain
high consensus when there is controversy, in particular. Then the
top-level page would refer to subpages on details and related topic
as best classified. If we began to understand notability as not
absolute, but relative, and use such a page structure, notability
decisions would be *classifications,* not absolute, as such. If it's
determined that there is a certain minimum standard for an article to
exist at all, (basically, WP:V), then the argument becomes, not
Keep/Delete for anything that can satisfy the policy, but what level
of notability and classification is best *for the reader*.
The present Wikipedia structure, to this reader, is a mess. Sometimes
I go to an article and it's just right, but more often there is
either too little detail or too much. Various revert wars, in topics
where there is either controversy or some faction or other wants the
project to be A Certain WAy, have removed much of what used to be of
high utility in topics I know. I read Robert Cleese the other way. I
love Mr. Cleese. And the article made me want to throw up. It's not
something specific, it is the indiscriminate mixture of truly notable
information wtih boring *verifiable* detail, assuming it's verifiable.
With a subpage structure, there would be a top level article on Mr.
Cleese. (Actually, it might not be fully top, there might be a
Comedians article above it, or something like that, or maybe
Biographies/Comedians.... etc. The Comedians page might be a general
history of Comedians, types of comedians, etc, based on sources, etc.
On the Cleese page would be an overview of his life and the most
notable aspects of it, like you'd find in an ordinary biographical
encyclopedia. And then there would be, as appropriate, subpages to
cover the "boring detail," which may, in fact, be of interest to someone.
>In an electronic encyclopedia using structured information, and
>sufficiently elaborate metadata and frameworks, to provide the
>different frameworks, the reader would be able to convert back and
>forth between separated and combined formats, just like an electronic
>map can display one or more layers .
Yeah, and subpages actually make this easy with any browser. I'm not
sure that "combined formats" are needed, but that's a software issue.
Collapse boxes are another approach that can be used instead of
subpages. And, suppose that this or some idea is a good one. How in
the world would a decision be made? I see that the simplest decisions
can take such horrifically complicated process that people have
mostly given up.
>The problem is not structure.
DGG has not understood my references to structure. It's about
decision-making process, which others have called "governance." But
how the project is presented is a *kind* of structure, a different
kind than what I'm talking about, and there is an inter-relation.
> The problem is that people take having a
>separate article as an indicator of importance, and will continue to
>do so. Readers have expectations, and we write for them, not
>ourselves, so we need to conform to what they expect of an
>encyclopedia format.
The expectation was inappropriate, setting that up was an error, that
predictably created high inefficiency, as the boundary is constantly
debated. We have piles of articles that do not match reader's
expectations of "importance," and missing articles that do, largely
because readers vary and have different needs and expectations. "The
sum of human knowledge" creates expectations that are seriously at
variance with actual practice.
>But another problem is content: in an open edited encyclopedia with no
>enforceable editorial guidelines, experience shows that the content of
>individual items in long articles will tend to shorten, and combining
>into large articles loses information. When there are short articles,
>people tend to want to make them longer, and they look for and add
>information--information sometimes in unencyclopedic detail.
Right. Give them a place to put "unencyclopedic detail." Don't
prohibit it, harness it. There are good reasons for sticking to WP:V,
and allowing linking to external sites that present speculation,
controversy, etc., etc., in some cases from the lowest permitted
layer on Wikipedia. Basically, Wikipedia should be the "sum" as in
"summary," i.e., precis, but for it to be neutral, it must be quite
complete, and it can resolve the contributions by linking to what it
cannot contain. To a student researching a topic, this would return
Wikipedia articles to what they used to often be -- in controversial
topics: links to the primary sources or "sides" of a controversy.
Often this would not be appropriate for an "encyclopedia article," in
itself. The top layer. But "summary" should include links to Further
Reading, particularly to a set of such links that would allow a
relatively complete understanding of the topic, in whatever detail is
desired by the reader. The project should facilitate the acquisition
of knowledge, as fully as possible, but much of this would be
indirect, by pointing to outside sources where the information
doesn't meet WP:V with sufficient strength.
>We are spending far too much time debating over structure of
>individual articles--it would be much better to have fixed conventions
>for different types of articles, and everyone write to them.
Bingo. And if people don't like the convention, there would be a
place to debate that. If there is a disconnet with a higher-level
decision and a lower-level one (I.e., at an article), then this
should be *resolved*. With whatever level of involvement of the
community as is necessary to actually resolve it instead of simply
deciding that one side is right and the other side is wrong and if
the other side keeps arguing, ban 'em. Without ever going through the
process of finding consensus, which isn't necessarily easy. But it's
necessary, or the project gradually becomes warped away from neutrality.
>Deliberately taking a field I do not work in, we could for example
>decide that all the athletic teams of a college will be grouped in one
>article separate from the college, regardless of importance and
>regardless of how how long or short the resulting article is.
That's right. Make class decisions, document them. Then if there are
exceptions, *document them.* Allow "instruction creep!" But without
turning the "instructions" into fixed rules, rather they should be
documentation of consensus, and consensus can change. And make the
change possible. And how to do that *efficiently* is my major focus
and concern, and has been for almost thirty years.
>Or we
>could decide that for some sports, such as football, we would always
>make a separate article if there were a varsity team.
The separate article would have a section in the overall one,
covering the football team in summary style. Standard.
> Either way,
>people would know where to write the material. (I am not advocating
>for doing either one of them, except to say that either one would be
>simpler to deal with than a mixture, and after their first experience
>with the encyclopedia, people would know where to look.
Sure. The guideline pages would themselves be hypertext; that can be
done in WP space. The only space where subpages don't work is
mainspace, which results in some weird stuff. For example, Talk:OS/2
thinks that it's a subpage of Talk:OS. It would have been better to
allow subpages in mainspace, for defined use, and use a special
character or escape character for a page name with a slash in it.
There is a MediaWiki option to allow subpages in mainspace, but I
don't know that there is a fix for the slash problem.
>according to reader choice.
Readers? Since when do they have a say? If you are a SPA (which
usually means some kind of expert on the topic, even if "only"
amateur), you are definitely second class. Being only a reader, who
will listen to you?
There would be a way to actually empower readers, but don't hold your
breath for the "community" to approve of it. The "community" means
the community of registered editors, and especially of
administrators, in practice, and, being invested in their own
contributions and positions on content, this community doesn't
necessarily have the same goals or values as readers. (In some cases,
the active editors understand the issues better than the ordinary
readers, but that's not always so reliable that it produces better
content, in terms of fundamental policy, it depends!)