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(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
----- Original Message ----
From: Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)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, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG