Adrian wrote:
Stan, in theory, you're right. In practice, I
see a tendency to the
opposite. Take a look at the SA link, in case you don't know it yet.
It's an old story, but the examples of article pairs, although many of
them are chosen tongue-in-cheek, speak for themselves.
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wikigroaning.php
"Wikigroaning" is somewhat amusing, but as a serious criticism it's
hopelessly fallacious. You can't just compare the byte count of the
article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number and the byte count
of the article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Prime and expect
to get a meaningful comparison of Wikipedia's coverage of those topics.
When a Wikipedia article reaches a certain size or level of detail
sections get split out into other articles that are focused on narrower
sub-topics; a more meaningful comparison is the content of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prime_numbers>. If all of
Wikipedia's coverage of prime numbers were merged into one article it
would be monsterously huge and unwieldy.
In any event, when one finds a situation where one topic has lots of
coverage and another topic has less but one feels should have more, I
don't believe the appropriate solution is to delete stuff from the first
topic until they're even. The solution should be to _add_ stuff to the
second topic.
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That depends if the second topic is a valid one in the first place.
Deletion, cutting, and merging are excellent ways to deal with articles
which aren't covered significantly in secondary, independent sources.
Editors edit. Part of that is to cut. That's not a bad thing.