On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 7:09 PM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@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