----- Original Message ---- From: Delirium delirium@hackish.org To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, June 2, 2008 11:10:05 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] User:FritzpollBot creating millions of new
Nathan wrote:
For Michel's email to be followed up by Mark's email is almost too much. Was that planned?
Although we're both talking about lists, we're talking about somewhat different things. He's objecting to the listification of, for example, episodes of TV series and characters in movies, when we actually do have enough to at least write a short paragraph on each---instead they get merged into a huge article with a bunch of one- and two-paragraph sections. He objects to proposals to do this for cities as well.
I tend to be a bit of an inclusionist so I also object to that---if there's enough to write at least a small paragraph I'd prefer a separate article. But I also think it's a bit silly to article-ify what is literally a single line in a 3-element table. If we want to do that, I could easily create tens of thousands of articles just by expanding our redlink lists automatically. In addition to lists of officeholders, virtually any article on a family or genus of living thing, for example, could have all its redlink species lists expanded out into stubs saying: '''''Genus species''''', commonly known as '''common name''', is a species of [[general type]]. But what good would this mass creation do anything except the article count? If all we have is a list of species of ''genus'', with their binomial name and common name, and nothing else, why not just put the list in the article on the genus as a redlist and wait until we get some more information to write separate articles?
Now if we had a stubbish but not just-database-entry article on each of those minor species, I'd oppose an unnecessary merge into [[List of minor passerine bird species]] or something, which is another matter.
-Mark
Wikipedia does have stubs with just about that little information on species or less information in the case of plants which seldom have common names. And they're being created largely by bots from databases.
Blechnic
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The article list distinction was necessary for Brittanica to keep the work of a reasonable size--and the key reason for not letting it expand was to maintain some degree of affordability. We do not have these problems. The difference in storage between the two is insignificant. True, there's a difference in article overhead--all the categories and links--but bots can handle this sort of work just fine.
This argument also goes the other way--we could break up our articles into little ones for each individual paragraph--sized sub-subtopic, and the reader could go back and forth as necessary, or the software assemble them. We already do this to some extent with illustrations--stored separately, and assembled as called up by the readers.
The question is only what form of presentation would our user find useful--it has nothing to do with "notability."
We could even have an interface which would at the readers option go back and forth between list and paragraph presentation. There can be detailed descriptions of each object in a work of fiction, and those who want to read about the work's publication details without finding out what's included in it could arrange not to see them & pretend they didn't exist--and they wouldn't, not in their wikipedia. Those who think something isn't notable wouldn't have to see it.
Come to think of it, they can do that already, it's just that they can't automatically hide from the fact hat the content they don't want is still there somewhere.
On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 2:55 PM, Blech Nic blechnic@yahoo.com wrote:
----- Original Message ---- From: Delirium delirium@hackish.org To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, June 2, 2008 11:10:05 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] User:FritzpollBot creating millions of new
Nathan wrote:
For Michel's email to be followed up by Mark's email is almost too much. Was that planned?
Although we're both talking about lists, we're talking about somewhat different things. He's objecting to the listification of, for example, episodes of TV series and characters in movies, when we actually do have enough to at least write a short paragraph on each---instead they get merged into a huge article with a bunch of one- and two-paragraph sections. He objects to proposals to do this for cities as well.
I tend to be a bit of an inclusionist so I also object to that---if there's enough to write at least a small paragraph I'd prefer a separate article. But I also think it's a bit silly to article-ify what is literally a single line in a 3-element table. If we want to do that, I could easily create tens of thousands of articles just by expanding our redlink lists automatically. In addition to lists of officeholders, virtually any article on a family or genus of living thing, for example, could have all its redlink species lists expanded out into stubs saying: '''''Genus species''''', commonly known as '''common name''', is a species of [[general type]]. But what good would this mass creation do anything except the article count? If all we have is a list of species of ''genus'', with their binomial name and common name, and nothing else, why not just put the list in the article on the genus as a redlist and wait until we get some more information to write separate articles?
Now if we had a stubbish but not just-database-entry article on each of those minor species, I'd oppose an unnecessary merge into [[List of minor passerine bird species]] or something, which is another matter.
-Mark
Wikipedia does have stubs with just about that little information on species or less information in the case of plants which seldom have common names. And they're being created largely by bots from databases.
Blechnic
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David Goodman wrote:
We could even have an interface which would at the readers option go back and forth between list and paragraph presentation. There can be detailed descriptions of each object in a work of fiction, and those who want to read about the work's publication details without finding out what's included in it could arrange not to see them & pretend they didn't exist--and they wouldn't, not in their wikipedia. Those who think something isn't notable wouldn't have to see it.
I've long been hoping that the flagged revisions thing could evolve in this direction, but considering how long it's taken to get just the barest vandalized/not-vandalized flagging in place I guess it'll be a while before we get notable/not-notable flagging.