2008/6/4 Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com:
While that's been an oft-repeated canard in the past, it is by no means a given. Nor, even if true, does it mean the best organizational structure is to have a separate one-sentence article for every tiny dot on the map, when lists could handle it far better.
"Lists could handle it far better"? I think that falls equally under "oft-repeated but by no means true" ;-)
Let's consider a few metrics.
* Informational content - about even. A one or two-line article (name, location, coordinates) can easily be replicated as a table without losing any amount of information, or vice versa. (Indeed, there is a case to be made for having both, the way I think we have with French villages)
* Development potential - seperate articles are much better, because tables are horrendous to edit for a new user. Even for an experienced user happy with the format, there's not really any way *to* expand our basic gazetter entry if it's a line in a table - you can't really add a chunk on at the side. With a seperate article, on the other hand, it's about as simple as it can be.
* Ease of maintenance - lists are much better. Only one article need be watched for vandalism, bot updates can be done in one edit, etc, (One small caveat: it does create potential confusion due to the hundreds of redirects - if the lists are reorganised, will all the redirects get moved?)
* Utility to reader - seperate articles are marginally better. As mentioned above, the actual amount of content is the same for a line in a list as for a stub article. The difference is that if you click on [[Jandaba, Georgia]] and get a stub you get the content presented to you immediately, whereas if you get a list you have to poke around to find it.
Given all this, I really don't see a clear case that combined lists handle this sort of thing better - each has one clear plus point, but to my mind the expansion potential more than outweighs the maintenance benefit.
We can make a much better case for using lists when thinking of things like asteroids, where the known information is both limited and very unlikely to be significantly expanded in the normal course of events. However, given that there *is* information out there on the town of Jandaba*, and we would quite like people to write about it, using the method that encourages them to do so seems advisable...