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On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 8:54 AM, Anthony wrote:
On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Philip Sandifer wrote:
I'll limit myself to fiction articles, since that's where I've seen the worst effects, though I'd love to hear from people who edit in other areas. [[List of characters in Gilmore Girls]] was the target of a wealth of merges of characters, such that no characters in the show have individual articles anymore. And, indeed, the old character articles were crappy in-universe messes of the sort we want to clean up.
There are a number of problematic *types* of merges, and I think you've hit on one of them. To my mind it never makes sense to redirect an instance of something to a list. Certainly not an article which clearly designates itself as a list, and more arguably not to those listy articles whose title doesn't explicitly call itself a list.
Of course, I see lists more as navigation tools than as articles in themselves, whereas the standard practice seems to mix articles and lists together. Surely it's in large part due to the fact that making lists is much easier than making an article which provides an overview of the topic. I also think the nature of wiki-collaboration leads to this type of article development. So it's probably a difficult problem to fix.
On the other hand, I just hit random page a dozen or so times and couldn't find any instances of these list-like articles. So I don't think it's for a large percentage of articles, though I do suspect a sample weighted by article traffic would show a bigger problem.
And then there are articles like [[YouTube]], which is almost the opposite problem (not enough merging - there are two "sections" which consist entirely of ''Main article: [[whatever]]''). Although, viewed differently, maybe it's the same problem - lack of synthesis.
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As a deletionist, I must admit I do agree that we should look at the topic of an article rather than its content. In some cases (A7, if I can remember CSD correctly--the one that deals with notability), the content is the only data to go on, especially for esoteric articles. Ghits are often used as a gauge when information is not available/known (e.g. if someone creates a nn bio of themselves or their friends or some other equally obscure topic). Often, if an article reads like it's just some random person, it gets deleted. But I digress. We're talking about merges. A merge often happens when there is /insufficient/ content. If the content hints at nonnotability, it is usually deleted. We should better encourage unmerging (is that a word...?), and create a /simple, easy to use/ system/gui for doing so. However, merging itself is not evil. If an "article" (a stub) is two sentences long, it makes more sense to group it with related information. That way, we (as a community) don't need to maintain an increased number of articles (yes, they still exist, they still take up space, but we don't need to protect them from vandalism etc., we don't need to update them as e.g. external links change, and a lot more), and the reader gets to read more than a few sentences. We presume that by entering a topic, they wanted information about it (or they wanted to edit it, but at least /some/ will want to read). Ergo, if there's only a few sentences on it available, they will (probably) want related/more information/external links, which a list provides.
I'm sorry to break off in the "middle" (end? I don't know) of a [[stream of consciousness]], but, well, let's just say something happened in the real world. Not a major crisis (or indeed something I seriously need to worry), but more than a distraction (or more than the average distraction). Not anything to worry about, so please don't panic
- - - -- Sincerely, [[User:Thinboy00]]