Ulrich Fuchs wrote:
The issue with many small interlinked articles is noise. You won't be able to type in "Sauna" and find what you would reasonably expect there (an etymology, a bit about finnish culture, health issues, literature links), instead you will have to use a *Search engine*, type in "Sauna" there, and get an immense number of articles that aren't related to the subject at all, like the fact that Johan Paulik made a film "Sauna paradiso" and that the MV Blue Marvin (a ship) also has a sauna.
??? Why in the world would you use a search engine? Even if [[Etymology of 'sauna']], [[Saunas in Finnish culture]], [[Health issues of saunas]], and [[Literature about saunas]] all end up large enough to deserve their own articles (unlikely but conceivable), you can *still* go to [[Sauna]] and find all of that -- even if just links to these pages. You never have to use a search engine and get all of that noise! The whole point of having a human-written page [[Sauna]] would be: * To give a brief discussion about all of these topics, before sending you off to the separate page if you want more; and * To list all of the pages that you'd be likely to want, without giving you noise that [[Sauna paradiso]] and [[MV Blue Marvin]]. This is just what you need to avoid relying on the noisy search engine.
This is the problem which we have with the WWW today already, and we should do everything to avoid that wikipedia will be running into the same problem in some years and just shows up as the same noisy mess the WWW is today.
The WWW doesn't have that problem *if* there's a single main page for a given subject that shows up first when you look for it (this is often the case, for example, with an organisation that you search for using Yahoo!). Otherwise it's a problem. On Wikipedia, we'll avoid that problem by having the page [[Sauna]].
We already have that problem right now: Go and try to enter "palestine" in the wikipedia search: There are more than 500 matches. The one article named "Palestine" is more or less a link list. What tells me that? I don't get the information out of Wikipedia, I'll get it out of Britannica. (Check out this link and you'll understand the difference: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=115036)
Typing "palestine" in the search is silly; go to [[Palestine]] instead. None of the articles named [[Palestine]] on any of the language wikis (when linked to from [[en:Palestine]]) is "more or less a link list". One could argue about whether they're better or worse than EB's, but your charge is unsupportable.
In other words: I do not want to need a google on wikipedia, to filter out noise, because it probably filters out that part of noise I am interested in. The only way to deal with that are IMHO *large* articles, structured by good editors. It is far easier to scroll down a large article with good structure (headlines) until you reach the part you are interested, than to klick around and hope to find that piece of information somewhere in some article which is somehow linked by a chain of three other articles.
"a chain of three other articles" -- nobody is suggesting this! The question is simply whether you'll find everything on [[Sauna]] or whether [[Sauna]] will instead link to them directly.
-- Toby