[[User:Thinboy00]] wrote:
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 not sure I really see the improvement though. If anything, these big list articles are much harder to organize, edit, and keep decent than smaller, focused articles are. As far as I can tell the main impetus for them is really a feeling that not-particularly-famous characters in some not-particularly-famous universe don't really "deserve" their own articles, and that merging them all into one somehow reduces clutter.
I'd guess that sort of embarrassment about articles on topics deemed not particularly noteworthy is why it comes up almost exclusively with fictional characters---you don't see anyone pushing to merge 500 minor Roman consuls into a big article like [[List of Roman Republic consuls about whom history has recorded no more than about 4 sentences worth of information]], or lots of very small towns in Minnesota into [[List of Minnesota towns with fewer than 100 people]]. They just each get their own, short article. This is more convenient for a number of reasons; for example, the Roman consuls who lived in the 3rd century BC can be conveniently found via [[Category:3rd century BC people]], which would be hard to do if they were all in a big list.
-Mark