On 5/28/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
The more ardent deleters have indeed put articles up for deletion for being "too detailed".
Hm. I haven't seen that one yet, ... That's grounds for pruning text or splitting an article and not grounds for deletion.
I suppose there might be a case where there is so much inappropriate material that it would be better to restart.... but that would be a very special case.
I'd really like to see an example so I could lart the culprit myself.
People who are only interested in the basics can still look up only the basics. It's a question of organisation, not a question of inclusion.
Yep. There's nothing wrong with subarticles of subarticles.
Eh, there are some subarticles that are out of date because people find the main one and edit it while the sub article doesn't get any love and attention. Also, when you start splitting articles you end up with a lot of duplicated material that can make reading all of them (when you are really interested) tedious. For example, consider articles about characters in works of fiction vs the text on the characters all gathered up under the work in question, or an article 'Characters used in soandsos writings' + redirects.
There is a place in the world for large amounts of detailed material, but this shouldn't be the goal of an encyclopedia.
Funny, and somehow I thought that the goal of Wikipedia is to "collect the sum of human knowledge".
Haven't you heard? Our new slogan is "Wikipedia is full. Go away." Now only *deserving* articles are kept (whatever that means); all others apparently have to make their case or be deleted in a consensus vote of three versus one.
Wikipedia isn't the only place in the world to store knowledge. It's clear that we already are aware of that, which is why we have wikibooks, wikiquotes, and wiktionary.
If I gave you an algorithm that generated an infinite amount of text without ever repeating itself I could rightly tell you that the answer to any question you might ask is in the output. But you find this very useful.
There is value in being concise, there is value to partitioning, and there is value to excluding.
*Wikipedia is not paper*. I see this often cited, but I think it is often cited by people who fail to grasp all of the implications, for example: We have a search engine, redirects, and hyperlinks, so every subject doesn't need an article of its own; people can be expected to find material inside other articles. We can provide instanious links to detailed information in millions of places all over the Internet as well as information contained in other wikimedia projects, so it is not optimum to provide all possible details in every article.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. This implies a relationship between the reader and the material (he is searching a lot and looking for more basic information on average), and it implies things about the creation of material (citations, avoiding original research, NPOV, trying to include a more general audience). Some content is best created and presented under a different set of criteria. By excluding this content, and perhaps giving it a home of its own, we improve useablity for everyone.