On 07/19/04 01:53, Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Mark Ryan ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
If we are meant to be only be using short stubbish articles for everything (I have heard some people saying using only the first paragraph of articles), then how will we keep this separate from the main articles? Go the same way as monobook.css and have it like [[Christianity/stub]]? There are little conceptual problems that need to be thought through before we jump in head-first into preparing for this.
Section 0 of every article should ideally have a lead section in it that acts as a concise summary of the entire article. Each of those lead sections should then be usable as concise encyclopedia articles in a single volume desk reference (with maybe an overview also thrown in for some subjects). Selection of articles and validation of those sections would still be needed, of course. Thus nothing need be compromised on Wikipedia.
Absolutely. That's why a strict [[news style]] [[inverted pyramid]] intro - first sentence, first paragraph, following paragraphs in order of droppability - is my very favourite article intro style.
Currently, [[Wikipedia:News style]] speaks of it as almost optional. I strongly suggest this status be upgraded, something like: "Although optional, a news style intro is strongly recommended if you want an article to be in Wikipedia 1.0 - many print articles are likely to be only the intro of the web article." Thoughts?
(Note that none of the 1.0 plans so far detract from the live wiki itself, and in fact would increase both its coverage and quality in useful ways.)
- d.