David Goodman wrote:
So put them in another space: call it directory
space.
The problem is that having a distinct article is treated as a question
of merit--we word things this way ourselves: "deserves an article".
Thus there is a continual pressure from spammers and hobbyists to
include a separate article for every company, lawyer, band, author,
athlete, railway station, street, toy, song, football match, and
fictional character. (note that 1/ for some of these we do include
articles on all, some not 2/that it's easier to decide on people, than
objects 3/that the list does not reflect my own views about what is
more or less suitable)
But the question should be content. We could very well say we should
have content on every one of the above, although not articles. We
might even find it easier to write such content if we didn't have the
overhead & metadata necessarily associated with separate articles.
Well, it's a theory. Books are traditionally organised in chapters,
supposed to address one topic. Lecture courses, too, are typically
divided into lectures each of which addresses one issue (though not
perhaps with such a clear focus). Our idea of an article is that it
starts with a topic sentence, within a lead that describes the rough
scope of the article. At present we are still holding to some version of
the old idea that "less is more": we don't allow articles that scroll on
for ever, and we try to have people adopt a concise style with good
focus. There will always be the argument that this is faintly
ridiculous, and "more is more". But there are huge advantages to the way
we now operate: we can for example think in terms of off-topic pieces of
information as "weeds", i.e. plants in the wrong place. It is certainly
true that there is maintenance to be done when topics are not allowed to
ramble. But I think a Wikipedia in which info was just "appended"
somewhere, rather than quite carefully placed by definite topic, would
be harder to use. (Rather than the usual suspects like manga, try
thinking about a topic such as social history. It benefits hugely when
efforts are made to bring it into focus by choosing a particular topic
for discussion, rather than just adding what amounts to historical local
colour to a scene.)
Charles