Erik Moeller wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
>OTOH, let's suppose that we have individual
articles on each character
>in addition to an article [[Characters in Atlas Shrugged]]
>that (I guess) summarises information on the characters.
I don't want that.
Yeah, I know that you don't want that.
Check my previous post again; this was the version under "Oliver's system"
of an attempt to make a comparison in your previous post fair.
>In general, about the same amount of text appears
under either system
Nope, you need redundant intros with separate articles.
For one paragraph
articles, this is substantial (about 20%). In addition, in my system, the
text is on one page, making it easy to do search/replace operations.
As I said (but you snipped), it's about the same amount of text
*except* for "very short" (that is, one-paragraph) articles.
Our disagreement is about articles with 3 to 10 paragraphs.
You're right about search/replace, however.
>Yes, it does, and we've already decided our
standards of significance:
>Gnipper *is* significant enough. Thus we have an article on him.
This is not the only question where significance
matters. In my view, if a
subject is relatively insignificant, it is more proper to discuss it in
context.
Since we ultimately agree about where [[en:Gnipper]] should go,
can you give me a concrete example for this?
Is [[en:Sarah Marple-Cantrell]] (discussed below) an example?
>So is your proposed policy about potential length
or significance?
Both. Mostly it is about avoiding eternal stubs that
are likely to be
neglected (I'm surprised that I think of this argument only now, it is a
very important one: very short articles on insignificant subjects are more
likely to be neglected, because fewer people will follow all the links
from an obscure page, and with more and more articles, the random page
likelihood per article decreases.), and because of all the other
disadvantages of short articles I have mentioned.
Well, again, I agree with you about very short articles.
Maybe we disagree about what "very short" means, however;
I don't think that [[en:Sarah Marple-Cantrell]] is very short --
even though it doesn't come close to your 20KB minimum.
>Do you have any objection to [[en:Sarah
Marple-Cantrell]],
>the example that got Oliver started on all this?
Yes. I would prefer this case to be discussed in the
context of teenage
suicides, with a redirect to that discussion on her name.
So do you think that all of the info in that article
should go in an article such as [[Teenage suicide]]?
Or would you prefer that this information be deleted --
and if so, why shouldn't Wikipedia contain that information?
(I will agree that Marple-Cantrell's case might well be discussed
on [[Teenage suicide]], with a link to the article on just her.)
-- Toby
PS: Is there any sense in which we're discussing Wikipedia-wide policy
and not just the standards for the English Wikipedia?
Should this discussion be moved to <wikiEN-l>?