On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
If there is only one noteworthy fact about the subject, the article should probably be merged per BLP1E. If there isn't more than a paragraph worth of stuff to say about a subject, you need to think long and hard about whether there should be an article. In some cases, there probably should, but I think it most cases such a lack of information is a sign that the article should be deleted or merged.
This is certainly not the case in, for example, medieval history. It's all relative to a background: what expectation is there of ample factual material?
And another thing - I'd resist this in all cases where there was a place for a person in a line of succession boxes. It is really no good merging an article if it messes up some useful navigation.
Succession boxes are useful navigation? :-) In some places, and for some things, yes, but succession boxes can be misused and overused, like anything else. In particular, I hate those articles where someone held multiple offices and titles and you see 5 or 6 succession boxes (or those big list templates) crammed in at the bottom of the article. Sure, I use them sometimes to find other articles, but they *look* horrible and unprofessional.
Those big "list" or "topic" template (footer boxes?) are bad in other ways as well. They mess up "what links here". There was a time when "what links here" for a random Nobel laureate would get you relevant links to articles related to that person. Now you get all the other Nobel laureates in the list as well, and when the footer bloat is bad you get totally unrelated articles appearing in "what links here" because those articles appear somewhere in some broad topic template that's been stuck on the bottom of 50 or so articles. Really annoying - categories was (is!) meant to avoid that.
Carcharoth