On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com 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.