Charles Matthews wrote:

Yes it is sui generis, but WP:NOT is part of that, not an add-on. I'm somewhat concerned that a reliance on "reader survey" will indeed tend to blur all tried-and-tested criteria for inclusion, for the sake of other stuff that is not too useful (e.g. "I wish you'd include more movie rumors because I really like to read about them"). Downmarket beckons.

Not sure why down-market has to beckon. We're committed to sourcing to the point I can't see a reader survey overturning that, in fact I would expect a reader survey to call for even better sourcing. Therefore, I can't really see how we could include unsourced movie rumors. Of course, I should imagine we'd all also agree that facts about upcoming movies are an area open to debate, but I'm not sure we should prejudge that debate by casting anything as a down-market move. To the point that I'd like a cite on why that would be a down-market move. I'm not suggesting Wikipedia be all things to all people, although I'd like us to make a better stab than we currently are, but I've always thought Wikipedia was a broad church, and I've always thought it was widely assumed on Wikipedia that we look to the middle-ground. Now I suppose if you see us on a high-ground, then yes, we would be shifting down-market, but realistically any encyclopedia is going to be aimed lower than the high ground, because an encyclopedia is a tertiary source, rather than a secondary source. The high ground is held by academia, something we aren't looking to replicate because of the policy on original research. I think utility is also in the eye of the beholder. Depending on which industry you work in, the utility of articles on entertainment and those on higher maths are subjective qualities. And surely blurring our still in beta stage inclusion guidance is a good idea, because life does not tend to happen in an absolute manner. The lack of adaptability in the minds of some of our contributors can sometimes harm us. I've never worked out a way of promoting the idea of an open mind and a case by case approach. I can't help but feel an encyclopedia built by the masses through consensus editing might help rather than hinder that goal. If that means moving to meet the audience, so be it. I believe it worked for Mohammed.

Charles Matthews wrote:

Downmarket, in my terms, is slanting content policy to favour in any way pages because they would be read often, rather than serve the purpose of being a reference site.

Not sure I can understand the difference between being read often and being referred too. But I think what's happened here is that assumptions are being made. You go on to say:

We are committed to the idea that the same sort of survey writing should be applied to say, "Star Wars" and astronomy, though. In the sense of "being a good place to look up" either. That is the "utility" of reference material. This is the same axis in another guise, I feel. The goal of a generalist encyclopedia is surely to become a reputed source largely independent of topic. (And we can perfectly well aim to assimilate the results of academic research; in fact over a wide range of topics this is exactly what we should do.)

And I don't find anything in this to disagree with, and yet we disagree, so obviously one of us or both of us are making assumptions. I don't see reader input into what we do as a bad thing, for starters. In fact, I thought the very ethos of Wikipedia was that reader input was welcome. I'm only here because the article I wanted to look up didn't exist, so I created it. I sourced it, I followed all the style guidance I could find, still made mistakes, but I added information to Wikipedia, moving from a reader to an editor. So there's reader input. If I wanted to do that now, I couldn't. So we've lost that reader input, and so we've lost a vital check on ensuring we are "a reputed source largely independent of topic". I don't see a reader survey suddenly causing us to stop writing in an encyclopedic manner, by which I mean citing sources and the like, because I don't think there will ever be a strong enough consensus to overturn the notion that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. If there is, it will be an interesting moment that might encourage a fork or two. I also agree that we can assimilate the results of academic research. Fortunately, that wasn't the point I was arguing against. The point I was making was that we were not the high-ground; we don't exist to publish academic research. Kind of like the distinction between Science and New Scientist, we're closer to the latter than the former, and the latter is a mid-market publication while the former is aimed at the high-end.

A recent grief of mine at CfD, though, might be good for a role play session. I found an advocate for "pre-emptive disambiguation for category titles"; I argued against this. For article titles, as we know, you don't pre-empt: [[Arthur Atkinson (architect)]] gets moved to [[Arthur Atkinson]] if there are no other articles of that personal name, even though there might be in the future. But the discussion was whether a category name that _might_ be construed as ambiguous should be made into a more verbose form that is less likely to be ambiguous. Is this some rule that someone has come up with and wants to impose, against common sense? Or was I just defending the status quo against an idea that should be adopted to improve the 'pedia? Not so clear on the ground.

I think you just had a difference of opinion based on your respective viewpoints. Did the debate generate a consensus?

Charles Matthews wrote:

The question is more whether lurkers should be stakeholders. Traditionally what is respected is showing the better way, rather than compiling a wishlist.

The best way to solve whether lurkers should be stakeholders is to ask them. Showing the better way would be fine. Have we agreed on a better way yet?

Why? You would be better advised to draft in userspace rather than just type straight into the box, but I don't understand why you think it doesn't still work in principle.

I can't do now what I did then. IP's cannot create new articles, and you have to wait four days after creating an account to create a new article. You just lost me. It doesn't still work either in principle or in practise.

...

The point I was making was that we were not the high-ground; we don't exist to publish academic research.

No, we exist to regurgitate it.

Hmm. Not sure I agree, but I think we'd head into a primary versus secondary sourcing argument. I'd certainly argue our mission would be to contextualise and explain the research through recourse to secondary sources, rather than to simply regurgitate it. I think there's a viable argument that regurgitating it would fall foul of NOT NEWS.

The closure was a compromise, rather than a consensus emerging. ([[Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2009 September 11#Deans of Lincoln]], for mavens.) While "Dean" and "Lincoln" were both deemed individually ambiguous, one side only was disambiguated. But not for a specific clash. So in a sense I lost the argument, it seems. But it could have been worse.

Hmm. Yes, interesting debate. That's one of the reasons I avoid CFD these days. I think a major point that got missed is that no-one asked the question of at what point would context not do the disambiguating. Only then would there be a need for disambiguating. There's been a lot of thought about CFD over the years, and how to address the shortcomings, but nothing has ever gotten nailed down. There's a conflict between consensus can change and speedy deletion criteria as currently installed at the moment, and there's also a lot of confusion as to what categories actually are and how they work. I think a lot of the issues with categories are down to the fact that we never nailed down what they were for when they were implemented, and now everyone has a different view on how to categorise. I still can't work out how, if you are looking at an article in Category:Deans of Lincoln, it won't be clear what Lincoln it is. But I've had this argument a number of times: people seem to like standards just to have standards. If a parent category says Lincoln, Lincolnshire, so must all sub-cats. Otherwise, it looks untidy.

2009/9/22 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:

...

I seem to recall that in the notability policy there is also scope for comprehensiveness. That is, if a certain number of a given category of entities is denoted "notable", then we include articles about *all* of them, for comprehensiveness.

(...)

OK, but take the argument that there aren't so many ski runs in Australia, and transfer it to some micro-sub-genre of heavy metal: "There just aren't so many perishthrashglam bands here, so we think it's just fine to have articles on all of them". Doesn't look so good.

I think we can easily distinguish, though; the notability-by-association thing really needs most of the set to be desirable topics for articles (*most* ski runs are interesting, or at least let us assume they are for this discussion!) and for that set to be well-defined (you can always tell if a ski run is in Australia or not).

The perishthrashglam bands are both a) generally uninteresting, and b) ill-defined; we won't have articles on most bands defined as part of that genre, and we won't ever be able to say "the genre consists solely of these seventy-nine bands and no-one else".

Surreptitiousness wrote:

Andrew Gray wrote:

...

I think we can easily distinguish, though; the notability-by-association thing really needs most of the set to be desirable topics for articles (*most* ski runs are interesting, or at least let us assume they are for this discussion!) and for that set to be well-defined (you can always tell if a ski run is in Australia or not).

Yes, this is exactly the sort of gradation we should have and should be able to implement, but is also the sort of gradation that the NOTINHERITED group of editors seek to stamp out. The notability guidance has also become a spanner in the works of Summary Style. You can't now split an article up if it is too long unless you split it in a way such that each separate article is notable by itself. And even if you manage to do that, there are editors who will accuse you of forking.

Rightly, in my view. I come down on the (conservative) side of this discussion, and agree with the now-ancient decision that article space should not admit subpages (which is what subarticles without credible free-standing topics amount to).

Charles

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

Surreptitiousness wrote:

And let's not forget that if we're looking at books, we have to take into account appendixes, something you have to fight to justify on Wikipedia. That list you want to split from your large FA? Hmm, is it a notable list? That list you want to include in your paper based subject specific encyclopedia? Certainly, Appendix A. I don't pretend to have any answers, all I'm asking for is thought and an attempt to address the actuality in front of editors rather than underhand attempts to protect an entire empire of rules. But I think on that at least we agree. We both appear to want fewer rules.

Sadly, there are also rules about what is and isn't an appropriate use of an appendix, in the Chicago Manual of Style and elsewhere ...

Charles

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:

Surreptitiousness wrote:

...

Andrew Gray wrote:

...

I think we can easily distinguish, though; the notability-by-association thing really needs most of the set to be desirable topics for articles (*most* ski runs are interesting, or at least let us assume they are for this discussion!) and for that set to be well-defined (you can always tell if a ski run is in Australia or not).

Yes, this is exactly the sort of gradation we should have and should be able to implement, but is also the sort of gradation that the NOTINHERITED group of editors seek to stamp out. The notability guidance has also become a spanner in the works of Summary Style.  You can't now split an article up if it is too long unless you split it in a way such that each separate article is notable by itself. And even if you manage to do that, there are editors who will accuse you of forking.

Rightly, in my view. I come down on the (conservative) side of this discussion, and agree with the now-ancient decision that article space should not admit subpages (which is what subarticles without credible free-standing topics amount to).

An example I saw recently that made me think of the discussions over NOTINHERITED, and notability of daughter articles, and how far summary style should go, was a recent featured article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson%27s_early_life

It helps that the main article is also featured:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson

And there is plenty of precedent for expanding on long articles through subarticles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Early_lives_by_individual

25 there and counting:

*Augustus *Pope Benedict XVI *George W. Bush *George Gordon Byron *Charles Darwin *Hugo Chávez *Marcus Aurelius *Jesus *John Milton *Pope John Paul II *Samuel Johnson *Abraham Lincoln *John McCain *Keith Miller *Marilyn Monroe *Isaac Newton *Barack Obama *Pope Pius XII *Plato *Samuel Coleridge *Joseph Smith, Jr. *Jan Smuts *Stalin *Rabindranath Tagore *George Washington

Some you would expect there to be enough material for this sort of treatment. Others less so. I like the idea of doing this sort of thing for very long biographcal articles, but seeing how it has developed in some cases, I'm not so sure. There are some articles I think should not be treated this way. The material out there is enough for one article, and that should be enough.

I did look for a category of "middle years" (or "middle life") and "later years" (or "later life") articles, but those seem less common. In fact, we seem to only have two "later life" articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later_life_of_Winston_Churchill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_later_life

We seem to have no actual articles on "middle years". Most such articles are probably specific ones about events and periods in a person's career and life. e.g. Darwin's Beagle Voyage.

There are templates grouping such life "segments" (or chapters) together:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IsaacNewtonSegments

That's 6 subarticles (actually, one is a link to a section in the main article).

Barack Obama seems to have 14 subarticles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Barack_Obama_sidebar

More examples of biographical navboxes here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_and_person_navbox_templates

It seems a given that for some topics where there is a lot of material and a lot of writers and a lot of interest, there will be a sprawl across lots of articles clustering around a central topic. Whether that is good in the long run, I'm not sure. The focus should be on the main article, but sometimes building up the surrounding articles (while the main article remains in a relatively poor state) can help build towards the main article being re-written as a summary of the subarticles. The other approach is to write the main article, and then spin sections off into new article as more material is added. I've seen both approaches used and both argued against (for different reasons).

Carcharoth

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:

2009/9/22 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:

...

Some you would expect there to be enough material for this sort of treatment. Others less so. I like the idea of doing this sort of thing for very long biographcal articles, but seeing how it has developed in some cases, I'm not so sure. There are some articles I think should not be treated this way. The material out there is enough for one article, and that should be enough.

I think a good analogy here is explicit general history articles. We view it as quite normal to go from

[[History of something]]

and then, when it gets too large, split it out into

[[History of something]]

• [[History of something in the Bronze Age]]
• [[History of something in the Middle Ages]]
• [[History of something in World War I]]

etc.

Indeed. And I agree with this for broad history articles, but less so for narrower topics, such as the biography of an individual. The question is where to stop.

There are some topics where thousands of articles could be written, to reflect the amount of secondary literature out there (especially on those broad history topics). But for biographical articles, are there books that cover XYZ's early life? If not, and if most biographies only have a chapter on it, should we really have a feature-length article on it? Should they not be considered part of a series, part of a whole?

Carcharoth

Surreptitiousness wrote

I don't really know what you do with early life articles. I'm still working out how you define early life.

Case-by-case, I should think. There is one on John Milton, going up to 1640 or so, which makes a lot of sense. Some lives are heavily segmented (e.g. Winston Churchill). If we say that the use of periods should conform to some natural "bookends", I don't think we'll go too far wrong. I have quite a few biographies that follow such a pattern.

Charles

Andrew Gray wrote:

I think a good analogy here is explicit general history articles. We view it as quite normal to go from

[[History of something]]

and then, when it gets too large, split it out into

[[History of something]]

• [[History of something in the Bronze Age]]

I know this is mildly on a tangent, but I find it interesting nevertheless...

Wouldn't that most likely be: * [[Prehistory & history of something in the Bronze Age]] ?

Or something like that...

IOW, doesn't the Bronze age kind-of straddle the boundary between prehistory and history?

• [[History of something in the Middle Ages]]
• [[History of something in World War I]]

etc.

PS. Feel free to moderate me if this is found to be too far from being of the topic of this list ;-D

Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

A modern book length biography of Johnson would certainly have chapters for different stages in his life (though Boswell wrote his in chronological order by year, but otherwise in a single continuous sequence (with the result that in the usual modern edition, the 4 vol. work needs a 2 vol. index.).

An article on it, print or encyclopedia, would have subheadings. The virtue of summary style is not just subdivision, but that our readers have multiple goals in mind, and the summary articles act as brief accounts. But we never should be writing a book-length biography, although we could in many cases find the necessary material, based entirely on secondary & tertiary sources. We could do even more: there are book-length works based on specific periods in his life (Kaminski's "Early career of Samuel Johnson"; Clifford's "Dictionary Johnson : Samuel Johnson's middle years".

. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:

...

Surreptitiousness wrote:

...

Andrew Gray wrote:

...

I think we can easily distinguish, though; the notability-by-association thing really needs most of the set to be desirable topics for articles (*most* ski runs are interesting, or at least let us assume they are for this discussion!) and for that set to be well-defined (you can always tell if a ski run is in Australia or not).

Yes, this is exactly the sort of gradation we should have and should be able to implement, but is also the sort of gradation that the NOTINHERITED group of editors seek to stamp out. The notability guidance has also become a spanner in the works of Summary Style.  You can't now split an article up if it is too long unless you split it in a way such that each separate article is notable by itself. And even if you manage to do that, there are editors who will accuse you of forking.

Rightly, in my view. I come down on the (conservative) side of this discussion, and agree with the now-ancient decision that article space should not admit subpages (which is what subarticles without credible free-standing topics amount to).

An example I saw recently that made me think of the discussions over NOTINHERITED, and notability of daughter articles, and how far summary style should go, was a recent featured article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson%27s_early_life

It helps that the main article is also featured:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson

And there is plenty of precedent for expanding on long articles through subarticles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Early_lives_by_individual

25 there and counting:

*Augustus *Pope Benedict XVI *George W. Bush *George Gordon Byron *Charles Darwin *Hugo Chávez *Marcus Aurelius *Jesus *John Milton *Pope John Paul II *Samuel Johnson *Abraham Lincoln *John McCain *Keith Miller *Marilyn Monroe *Isaac Newton *Barack Obama *Pope Pius XII *Plato *Samuel Coleridge *Joseph Smith, Jr. *Jan Smuts *Stalin *Rabindranath Tagore *George Washington

Some you would expect there to be enough material for this sort of treatment. Others less so. I like the idea of doing this sort of thing for very long biographcal articles, but seeing how it has developed in some cases, I'm not so sure. There are some articles I think should not be treated this way. The material out there is enough for one article, and that should be enough.

I did look for a category of "middle years" (or "middle life") and "later years" (or "later life") articles, but those seem less common. In fact, we seem to only have two "later life" articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later_life_of_Winston_Churchill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_later_life

We seem to have no actual articles on "middle years". Most such articles are probably specific ones about events and periods in a person's career and life. e.g. Darwin's Beagle Voyage.

There are templates grouping such life "segments" (or chapters) together:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IsaacNewtonSegments

That's 6 subarticles (actually, one is a link to a section in the main article).

Barack Obama seems to have 14 subarticles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Barack_Obama_sidebar

More examples of biographical navboxes here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_and_person_navbox_templates

It seems a given that for some topics where there is a lot of material and a lot of writers and a lot of interest, there will be a sprawl across lots of articles clustering around a central topic. Whether that is good in the long run, I'm not sure. The focus should be on the main article, but sometimes building up the surrounding articles (while the main article remains in a relatively poor state) can help build towards the main article being re-written as a summary of the subarticles. The other approach is to write the main article, and then spin sections off into new article as more material is added. I've seen both approaches used and both argued against (for different reasons).

Carcharoth

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We could do even more: there are book-length works based on specific periods in his life (Kaminski's "Early career of Samuel Johnson"; Clifford's "Dictionary Johnson : Samuel Johnson's middle years".

I meant that it would be *possible* for us to do this without violating WP:OR, not that we *ought* to. Given the detail of academic sourcing in some subject, many Wikipedia articles could be ten times their size. This is not always desirable.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 4:22 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:

...

A modern book length biography of Johnson would certainly have chapters for different stages in his life (though Boswell wrote his in chronological order by year, but otherwise in a single continuous sequence (with the result that in the usual modern edition, the 4 vol. work needs a 2 vol. index.).

Thanks for the background. I suspected there were massive works out there.

...

An article on it, print or encyclopedia, would have subheadings. The virtue of summary style is not just subdivision, but that our readers have multiple goals in mind, and the summary articles act as  brief accounts.

Summary articles? Don't you mean summary sections? No article should be just a collection of summaries, though the lead section should be a summary of the whole article, and some sections can be summaries of larger articles. But having the entire article be a collection of summaries is bad (for starters, when you edit one of the subarticles, there is no warning that you are also affecting content on another page, and thus might be contradicting what is said elsewhere on that page).

I recently came across an attempt to set up pathology as an article composed entirely of sections consisting of lead sections of the subarticles. It wasn't very successful.

The page can still be seen here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pathology&oldid=301684595

Click "edit" on that old page version to see what I mean about how this was set up (but don't click save!).

Because transclusions like that are dynamic, that sort of thing severely messes up the page history - you can't see what the article looked like at any one time, because the editing took place in the subarticles, not on the main article, and even if you look back at that page version "12 July 2009", what you are seeing there is transclusions of what the lead sections of the subarticles say *now*.

...

But we never should be writing a book-length biography,

Agreed.

...

although we could in many cases find the necessary material, based entirely on secondary & tertiary sources.

So should that more detailed material be used or not? And if so, in what way?

...

We could do even more: there are book-length works based on specific  periods in his life (Kaminski's "Early career of Samuel Johnson";  Clifford's "Dictionary Johnson : Samuel Johnson's middle years".

But doesn't this contradict what you said earlier?

"we never should be writing a book-length biography"

Or do you mean that a series of articles that *together* would be the equivalent of a book-length biography, is OK, but a *single* article that is the length of a book, is not OK? Or am I misunderstanding what you are saying here? Maybe you mean a middle ground, where we have more than one article, each on a different period in a person's life, but we shouldn't have so many, in such detail, that the collection as a whole approaches book length?

If you mean the latter, then the collection of Obama articles we have are approaching the length of a book. Is that good or not?

Collection:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Barack_Obama_sidebar

Main article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

Subarticles (chronological):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_and_career_of_Barack_Obama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_Senate_career_of_Barack_Obama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_career_of_Barack_Obama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_presidential_primary_campaign,_200... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_presidential_campaign,_2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_transition_of_Barack_Obama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_of_Barack_Obama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Barack_Obama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_100_days_of_Barack_Obama%27s_presidency

We also have two appendix/list-type articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_Barack_Obama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Presidency_of_Barack_Obama

And general topic articles, that take a different approach to looking at Obama's life:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Barack_Obama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Barack_Obama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_of_Barack_Obama

Overall, that collection is approaching the size of a decent booklet on Obama.

It is also interesting to compare the amount of coverage of Obama in terms of standalone articles, compared to other presidents and presidencies.

The article we have on the Presidential transition of Barack Obama is the only article we have on any presidential transition (the others are sections in the articles on the presidencies or the presidents, if that). This can be confirmed by this search (using the 'intitle' search parameter):

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=0&...

Is the fact that this is the only presidential transition to get its own article because this is the most intensely documented presidential transition in history? Or is it because Wikipedia's segmented coverage of Barack Obama's life has gone too far? Or is it because the other articles on presidential transitions have yet to be written?

Take Presidential inaugurations. We have a lot more of those:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_States_presidential_inauguratio...

Note that many subarticles are subarticles of more than one article. The ones on Barack Obama's presidential transition and inauguration would be both subarticles of Barack Obama, and also subarticles of the articles on the history of US presidential transitions and US presidential inaugurations. And in theory, those would in turn be subarticles on the history of the US presidency, and so on and so on. Though drawing the line around a topic has to be done at some point.

The question seems to be, should articles and subarticles sprout far and wide as long as there are sufficient sources to support them? Or should growth from a central article be more planned and steady than that?

Carcharoth

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On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 7:15 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:

<snip>

Never underestimate the effects of recentism ;-)

Indeed.

Although, peering into my crystal ball, into the future, far as human eye can see...

10,000 years in the future, and Barack Obama is a small paragraph in "United States Presidency" and a single-line entry in "List of Presidents of the United States of America".

Never underestimate eventualism! :-)

Carcharoth

Steve Bennett wrote:

Fwiw, my take is to use the more general approach of "do we have enough editors to mantain this depth of coverage". For the Obama transition we probably do, for the Truman one, probably not. As the years go by, the scales will tip and eventually we'll have to scale back our coverage.

The better alternative is to scale up the shorter article. This is an extension of 'Wiki is not paper'.

The only time this is a real problem is when one article has different sections that are grossly out of proportion, making one event or person look more "important" than another, simply because we have more people writing on it.

Why does that need to be a problem? You can't expect all articles to grow at the same rate.

Ec

2009/9/24 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:

He said sections, not articles. WP:UNDUE applies within articles. Whether a version of WP:UNDUE should apply across the whole encyclopedia is essentially the question of notability repackaged. And when you spin sections out of existing articles to form new articles, then WP:UNDUE clashes with WP:NOTABILITY (expand a section - you may be unbalancing the article; spin off section to form a new article - you may be unbalancing the encyclopedia).

That's a view of the project that comes from an immature understanding of it. Unbalancing an article is all visible on the same page; however, three million Simpsons articles is *invisible* to the readers of articles on particle physics unless they specifically go looking for them. It actually doesn't affect them at all.

Back in the early days of the odious origins of the jargon word "notability", back when it was a buzzword on VFD meaning "I haven't heard of it," people would raise this as one of the spurious arguments that made no sense on a moment's reflection. Like the one that too much text would overload the servers, so the okemon articls had to go.

Please don't say this stuff without at least a moment's thought on whether it actually makes any sense.

- d.

Carcharoth wrote:

...

Back in the early days of the odious origins of the jargon word "notability", back when it was a buzzword on VFD meaning "I haven't heard of it," people would raise this as one of the spurious arguments that made no sense on a moment's reflection. Like the one that too much text would overload the servers, so the okemon articls had to go.

Please don't say this stuff without at least a moment's thought on whether it actually makes any sense.

I do try. Hint: this was about summary style spin-off articles, and where the line is drawn there. Not about notability in general. Replace references to notability above with WP:SUMMARY, and it might calm you down.

I was going to disagree with your comment, too, though not quite on the same grounds as David Gerard. There can "aesthetic" grounds for objecting to global imbalances of coverage; but they really have no status. Disproportionate coverage can be a problem under NPOV. Otherwise I think it shades off into being a writing issue: where we favour concision as better for the reader.

Charles

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

The better alternative is to scale up the shorter article. This is an extension of 'Wiki is not paper'.

Yeah but that's like saying the better alternative to any problem is to solve it. With our volunteer army, we're essentially in the position that we can stop them doing certain things, and if we try hard, we can get them to do things they're already doing in a different way. But damned if we can get them to do new things they weren't already doing.

Steve

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 9:02 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:

OK, but take the argument that there aren't so many ski runs in Australia, and transfer it to some micro-sub-genre of heavy metal: "There just aren't so many perishthrashglam bands here, so we think it's just fine to have articles on all of them". Doesn't look so good.

Point taken, but I would distinguish between categories that are arbitrarily finite, and those that are necessarily finite. It would theoretically be possible to have maybe one or two more ski resorts in Australia - but no new mountains are being created, so it's limited. And even the smallest resorts are pretty big operations (well, in Australia anyway - the smallest NZ fields are run by ski clubs), have been around for decades, have their own postcodes..etc etc.

Or to put it differently: the bar to entry to being a ski resort is much higher than the bar to entry to being a perishthrashglam band, so merely by existing you've done something worth writing about.

The connection of ski runs with the naming of geographical features probably saves them (the cavalry coming) in numerous cases. It would be perverse to say an article about the feature couldn't mention the ski area appropriately, and include a relevant category.

Yeah, although the mapping isn't one-to-one. In Australia, ski resorts correspond roughly with mountains, but in other countries, many resorts can share one mountain.

Yes it is sui generis, but WP:NOT is part of that, not an add-on. I'm somewhat concerned that a reliance on "reader survey" will indeed tend to blur all tried-and-tested criteria for inclusion, for the sake of other stuff that is not too useful (e.g. "I wish you'd include more movie rumors because I really like to read about them"). Downmarket beckons.

Yes, the question about what to include and why is a difficult one that there really isn't much agreement on. I would much rather see a definitive reason like "We don't include articles about potential movies because they are too subject to abuse" rather than "We don't include articles about potential movies because traditional encyclopaedias never did, and we're pretending we're a traditional encyclopaedia".

Steve