At 09:04 AM 3/6/2010, Carcharoth wrote:

Structuring of content is an interesting question. Sometimes small stubs are better than a list, as it is easier to link to separate articles than to items in a list, especially if there is no real unifying structure for the list. Sometimes it takes a while to work out what list, or summary article, something should be part of, but if done well, that can work well.

As a process junkie, my concern is how the decision gets made. When there is an article covering the *class* of articles, and national society members of a notable international society provides such an example, then a list can be used either within that article or separately. Then the question arises as whether available sourced detail about each society should go in the list or in stubs (with stubs becoming more extensive articles where justified by the existence of sources.) That's a decision on which no general guideline could be set, I believe, at least not at this point. One of the ways of creating "guidelines" is to link to examples of decisions, which can then point out inconsistencies, and sometimes these inconsistencies represent truly different cases (i.e., they aren't really inconsistent, because the conditions are different) or represent a need for attention to one or the other examples. Creating better guidelines like this could actually result in cleaner content.

But not by making guidelines controlling, simply by making them reflect actual practice, which might, transiently, actually cite contradictory practices.

When actual practice conflicts with a guideline, if the actual practice is cited in the guideline as an exception, it then can attract wider review. Is this good? I think so! Maybe the actual practice is what's defective and what will fix it is changing the actual decisions, not demanding that the guideline reflect the ideal.

But sometimes separate articles is the way to go. Even if the individual articles are unlikely to be much more than a GA-level article at best, the separate articles approach has several advantages, even if some content gets duplicated across several articles.

Yes. The radio amateur stubs all say more or less the same thing in the lede, boilerplate. But that's short. They have the logo of the society in a template. The articles are mostly brief and attractive. There are two lists, the list of national members of the IARU, in the IARU article, and a List of amateur radio organizations. The latter is a far more problematic case, and attention will turn to it and the articles listed there. The "deletionist" -- no aspersions intended -- focused on the national organizations, where the strongest case can be made. If this editor had succeeded there, there then would have been a pile of AfDs very likely to be successful. I have not expressed an opinion on the pile of local clubs shown in the overall list, but I'm guessing that consensus there will be to merge most of the individual articles back to the list, once the national organization issue is out of the way, which it largely is. There will be, I expect, if I'm not banned in short order, a DRV on the single deleted national organization, and I expect it's likely to be successful at undeletion. Or not. *Wikipedia process is unreliable.* Sure, ultimately a consensus can be found, but it can be horrific getting there.