On 1/12/06, Haukur Þorgeirsson haukurth@hi.is wrote:
(This discussion is on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changes_in_immigrant_groups_extended_family_pos... )
Actually I don't think the topic is at all appropriate for an encyclopedia. It'd make a good essay, but I seriously doubt you'd see such a title (or indeed any which start out "Changes in...") in, for example, Britannica. For Wikipedia sometimes we get strange article titles like this for what is really a subpage of another article, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Nevertheless it would be possible to write a well-referenced article on this topic in encyclopedic style and if we had such an article it would be kept if brought up for AfD.
Maybe it would be kept, I'm not sure, but we weren't really talking about what would happen but rather what should happen. An article at that title just shouldn't exist, in my opinion, regardless of how well written it is.
This does touch on the question of how to break up articles which are too large, though. For example, we have an article, [[Responsibility for the September 11, 2001 attacks]], even though such an article title would probably never be found in a traditional encyclopedia. But I see that as really a sub-article more than an article in itself.
In that vein, maybe [[Changes in immigrant groups extended family positions]] would make sense as a sub-article of [[extended family]] or [[immigration]], but barring some space considerations in those parent articles I'd rather see it merged, regardless of the quality of the text.
How would you recommend we proceed?
Redirect to [[extended family]] (optionally merging if you think it's worthwhile).
I don't think it's worthwhile, I think it's worthless.
Fair enough. I was more thinking if the person making the redirect thought any parts of it could be easily salvaged. Personally, if I were the one fixing it, I'd just make the redirect without any merge at all.
But why should we have a redirect there?
Because the system doesn't support semi-deletion, and redirects keep the information there for someone else to fix. I'm not confident enough to say that no one could ever find any of that information useful for making an encyclopedia, so I wouldn't feel comfortable deleting it. Making a redirect is easily reversible should someone disagree with my decision, and yet it doesn't require bothering a large group of people to see whether or not they agree.
The tiny bit of disk space the content takes up in the mean time is not, in my opinion, worth the time it takes to have a discussion on whether or not to remove it.
The title is, as you noted, ridiculously long and clumsy so no-one is likely to type it in. And the article has no incoming links. Shouldn't we just delete it?
In my opinion, no, we shouldn't. But I'm going on the assumption that the content wasn't complete patent nonsense, and therefore not *completely* worthless.
In any case I realize that since you feel that the topic of the article is inappropriate for Wikipedia this was not in fact a good example for the discussion we were having :)
I guess. When I made the statement I was more thinking about an article title which we absolutely should include. Maybe my statement was a bit overbroad in not taking these titles which I referred to as "sub-articles" into consideration.
Thanks for taking a look!
Regards, Haukur
Sure thing.
Anthony