Jimmy Wales wrote:
I think that deletionism forgets that Wiki Is Not Paper, and that completionism is likely to lead us to a better final article.
The problem with this approach is that while Wiki is Not Paper, readers' attention spans are limited. If I want to read an overview of Mother Theresa's life, I most certainly do not want it to be 20 pages long. I'd much prefer a more summarized (dare I say, "encyclopedia-style") biography. If the rest of the information must be in Wikipedia, it'd be nice if it were factored out into separate articles (maybe "Criticism of Mother Theresa" and "Reasons for Mother Theresa's Beatification" or something similar). Generally if a Wikipedia article is so ridiculously long that nobody not doing a thesis on the topic would want to read it, it becomes much less useful to the general public.
-Mark
Absolutely correct. Encyclopædic articles are not simply limited by paper but by a range of other issues; readability, context, comprendability, communicative structure, layout, etc. Extraordinarily complex topics need a lot of space; World Wars I and II, Vietnam War, intellectual concepts, major historical facts, etc but except in extreme cases we need to keep biographies readable, not turn them into theses simply because we don't have a paper usgae limit. Saying 'lets get everything we can in because we can' isn't encyclopædic, it is amateurish. Encylopædias communicate themes, movements, contexts, relevances, not a 'fling the whole lot in' approach. We have books to do that. An encyclopædia fulfils a different educational role. And all producing articles of mini-thesis size will do is frighten away readers, because people don't come to encyclopædias for that sort of information, which they can get, written by professional sociologists/historians/academics on the shelves of their library. If they can get a five paragraph summary in Brittanica, and a good book in the library they will do it, in preference to a 32K article whose reliability they cannot vouch for because they don't know how qualified the authors were to write about it or how much is someone's personal agenda, on wikipedia. We need to remember what an encyclopædia is and is not, what we can do well and by our nature we cannot do well. And in depth NPOV is not wikipedia's strong point given that it does not go through independent assessment but is produced in a free-for-all writing spree. (Often that free-for-all approach produces superb stuff. All too often it doesn't, as the embarrassing article on Mother Teresa, which not a single solitary person hasn recommended in preference to a better, more NPOV version by Adam Carr, is the embodiment of, showing what happens when an article goes seriously, embarrassingly and indeed almost comically wrong.)
JT
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From: James Duffy
Absolutely correct. Encyclopædic articles are not simply limited by
paper
but by a range of other issues; readability, context, comprendability, communicative structure, layout, etc. Extraordinarily complex topics
need
a lot of space; World Wars I and II, Vietnam War, intellectual concepts, major historical facts, etc but except in extreme cases we need to keep biographies readable, not turn them into theses simply because we
don't
have a paper usgae limit. Saying 'lets get everything we can in because we
can'
isn't encyclopædic, it is amateurish.
No, actually "encyclopedic", in its root meaning, is "including everything".
Encylopædias communicate themes, movements, contexts, relevances, not a 'fling the whole lot in'
approach..
We have books to do that. An encyclopædia fulfils a different educational role.
A dead-tree encyclopedia fulfils a different educational role. Wikipedia is not a dead-tree encyclopedia.
Your argument conflates trying to include everything in Wikipedia with making impossibly long articles.
That is fallacious.
It is TRUE that people should avoid making super-long articles because of readability, editability, etc.
It is FALSE that people should avoid adding tons of content because of the problems of super-long articles.
There should be a limit on the length of entries; if not formally enforced, then informally.
A method of automagically linking associated articles in an intelligent manner would be a helpful (though complicated to implement) tool.
James Duffy wrote:
major historical facts, etc but except in extreme cases we need to keep biographies readable, not turn them into theses simply because we don't have a paper usgae limit. Saying 'lets get everything we can in because we can' isn't encyclop?dic, it is amateurish.
I don't think anyone disagrees with that. Erik in particular has been a big proponent of breaking down articles into more manageable sizes when they grow too big.
That doesn't seem to be the issue in this particular case, though -- the article isn't that long, indeed for such a major figure in history it clearly isn't nearly long enough.
And in depth NPOV is not wikipedia's strong point given that it does not go through independent assessment but is produced in a free-for-all writing spree.
I'd say that in-depth NPOV is precisely our strong point -- we do it better than anyone else ever has.
(Often that free-for-all approach produces superb stuff. All too often it doesn't, as the embarrassing article on Mother Teresa, which not a single solitary person hasn recommended in preference to a better, more NPOV version by Adam Carr, is the embodiment of, showing what happens when an article goes seriously, embarrassingly and indeed almost comically wrong.)
If not a single solitary person prefers the current version to that of Adam Carr, then why doesn't someone just cut and paste and replace it?
I suspect the answer is that there is a single solitary person (at least) who does prefer the current article, or who would like to see them merged, is that right?
(I ask seriously, becuase I haven't read the Adam Carr version.)
Be Bold.
--Jimbo