On Wed, 13 Feb 2002, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Larry wrote:
I'd like to see one example of an article, or a class of articles, that would be clearly improved by being put in article-with-subsections form, rather than simply broken into a series of shorter articles.
I understand that you want an example, and I don't intend to make one.
I understand that you think subsections are a nifty idea, and I don't intend to support the idea. :-) Without an example to work with, discussion seems pretty pointless.
That was why I just mentioned potential power of section headings as loose idea on the tech list. Many encyclopedias have really long articles that are subdivided in this way. Making separate articles (without using subpages) requires that they can stand alone with just a brief introduction at the top. This is fine with [[Swedish monarchs]] or [[History of Poland]], which don't need to be part of [[Sweden]] or [[Poland]]. But "The Middle Ages" is a section heading in [[History of Poland]]. If broken out into a separate article, what title should that page have? Maybe [[Medieval history of Poland]]?
And yet you give an example anyway. :-)
Yes, something like [[medieval history of Poland]] or [[Poland in the Middle Ages]] or even [[medieval Poland]] (by golly!).
There are many features that are "powerful," and yet it would be an extremely bad idea for us to have them. Why? Because they complicate the EDITING system. I'm generally opposed to further complications to the system that would require users to learn much more about how to use the system. If there's one thing we've learned from Nupedia (and it was sure an expensive mistake) it's that not many people aren't going to use a system if it's incredibly complicated. Meanwhile, Wikipedia was very easy to use from the beginning and very quickly became more active than Nupedia.
Again, simplicity is a constraint we have to work with. At some point, it has to care weight with us in designing the system any further. For me, the system is probably *more* complicated than it needs to be.
There's only one really significant change that I would stand behind, that I can think of offhand, which would constitute an addition to the system: *some* sort of categorization system, as we were discussing (probably a multiple-select list of categories next to the "save" button),
This isn't to say that we can't have some very powerful, complicated stuff going on at the metainformation and text processing levels, of course.
It also isn't to say that we can't have some "master version" living somewhere that is beautifully marked up.
Larry