On 26/09/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
I am not wedded to the idea of needing a separate article for each and every school in the US. I do think that the info should be included here, somewhere. A realistic policy that balances including the info and using fairly normal article size management process would be fine. But it would be terrible to do it in a messy hodgepodge manner; we should identify a pattern and establish a guideline, if that's going to happen.
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com _______________________________________________
Well - I would argue that this is not specific to school articles - and that there is a fundemental problem with organisation of information on Wikipedia. Information naturally is hierarchical - if we are really an encyclopaedia, broad topics need articles that refer to sub-topics, that break down to the minuitia.
Sure this sort of happens - but like you say - it's in a messy hodgepodge manner.
Even if there are "guidelines", Wikipedia's organisation mechanism will ensure that there is - generally speaking, no consistent standard of applying those guidelines. Nevermind the fact that the concept of having no hard and fast rules is not really sustainable.
I make little apology for being so critical of Wikipedia's processes - I only do so because I've been here for quite some time, put a lot into the project, and would really like to see it improve a lot. At present it's like driving down the national roads (main arterial routes) in Ireland - where along the same route you will have anything between spanking new motorway and aged narrow two lane (no hard shoulders) winding bumpy country road (on a major intercity route). Oh - except that in Wikipedia's case - bits of the road are missing entirely.
Zoney