Hello,
I was wondering if anyone wanted to give their thoughts on the applicability of [[m:Wiki is not paper]] to Wikipedia.
In the section headed "No size limits", someone says it should be okay to have pages for every "Simpsons" character, and even pages for every episode. This is followed by Jimbo saying, "I agree with this one completely."
I take this to mean that there is barely any limit on the triviality of a subject that could be allowed to have its own Wikipedia article. With apologies to "Simpsons" fans if this is blasphemy... ;) As I interpret it, it's saying that pretty much any subject could be covered - within the usual constraints of NPOV and verifiability, of course.
So we could include people and events that have not had significant impact on a global or even a national level, but which maybe only affected a small group of people. As long as there is some coverage in published sources, somewhere, we could use that to make an article on the subject.
If this is all terribly wrong, can we come up with a more definite policy, saying what the criteria are for an article to be allowed, and amend [[m:Wiki is not paper]] and the policy pages accordingly?
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
Oliver-
If this is all terribly wrong, can we come up with a more definite policy, saying what the criteria are for an article to be allowed, and amend [[m:Wiki is not paper]] and the policy pages accordingly?
I agree for the most part, with one exception:
Articles that are always likely to remain stubs should not have their own page, but be integrated into the main article. This is especially true for fictional realms. Yesterday I merged two-sentence articles about Gnasher, Gnipper, Rasher, Bea, and a bunch of other characters from "Dennis the Menace" into the main article; the same happened earlier with "Chip 'n Dale". If you check the "Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers" article, you will notice that it covers extensively the opinions of Chip 'n Dale fan fiction authors on the psychological state and possibly hardening life circumstances of Louwhiney, a young female Hawaiian anthropomorphic mouse and evil twin of lead character Gadget Hackwrench; not to mention giving us a summary of the current trends among the authors of Slash fiction (that is, gay/lesbian sexual fantasies) regarding the development of relationships between Gadget Hackwrench and Tammy the Squirrel.
I like to keep that kind of stuff constrained.
That makes it easier to look after it and edit out material which is going overboard. I also think we should strive toward a state where every article is about 20000-30000 characters long. An article that cannot be this long should be integrated elsewhere, one which is longer should be split up.
Otherwise we will soon hear that of our 12 million articles (at the current rate, this seems not too far off), 7.5 million cover fictional characters. There are probably more of those than real human beings ... So please help me with the fiction stuff, I currently seem to be the only one who looks after those pages.
Regards,
Erik
If this is all terribly wrong, can we come up with a more definite policy, saying what the criteria are for an article to be allowed, and amend [[m:Wiki is not paper]] and the policy pages accordingly?
I agree for the most part, with one exception:
Articles that are always likely to remain stubs should not have their own page, but be integrated into the main article. This is especially true for fictional realms. Yesterday I merged two-sentence articles about Gnasher, Gnipper, Rasher, Bea, and a bunch of other characters from "Dennis the Menace" into the main article;...
I don't see this as an exception, really, just an exercise of editorial judgment about the best way to write about a subject. When I wrote "Wiki is not paper", I was indeed of the opinion that every subject no matter how trivial deserves coverage if someone is willing to write a good article about it.
Part of the job of writing good articles is deciding what should be split off into its own page, and what should be integrated as a small mention in a larger article. That says nothing about what subjects are or are not "significant" enough to write about at all: just how one chooses to write about them. I'm all for interesting trivia, just write it well.
Oliver Pereira wrote:
Hello,
I was wondering if anyone wanted to give their thoughts on the applicability of [[m:Wiki is not paper]] to Wikipedia.
In the section headed "No size limits", someone says it should be okay to have pages for every "Simpsons" character, and even pages for every episode. This is followed by Jimbo saying, "I agree with this one completely."
I take this to mean that there is barely any limit on the triviality of a subject that could be allowed to have its own Wikipedia article. With apologies to "Simpsons" fans if this is blasphemy... ;) As I interpret it, it's saying that pretty much any subject could be covered - within the usual constraints of NPOV and verifiability, of course.
So we could include people and events that have not had significant impact on a global or even a national level, but which maybe only affected a small group of people. As long as there is some coverage in published sources, somewhere, we could use that to make an article on the subject.
If this is all terribly wrong, can we come up with a more definite policy, saying what the criteria are for an article to be allowed, and amend [[m:Wiki is not paper]] and the policy pages accordingly?
I've been mentally testing a "thousand-person rule" - anything that has only ever had a direct conscious effect on fewer than 1,000 people during its existence is too obscure for wikipedia. So for instance an aircraft carrier makes the cut because it has 5,000 crew, is a player in world events, etc, but a tugboat that was constructed by 100 workers at a shipyard, with a crew of 20, and only the Navy paymaster aware of its continued existence :-), is not important enough, unless it happens to save the damaged carrier by towing it somewhere.
Alternates could be a 100-person rule, although that leaves in small-town garden clubs and the like, seems too broad to me. A million-person rule would cut out lots of specialized technical stuff, although lots of pop culture would get to stay, including most likely all of the Simpsons characters. :-)
Stan
Oliver Pereira wrote in part:
So we could include people and events that have not had significant impact on a global or even a national level, but which maybe only affected a small group of people. As long as there is some coverage in published sources, somewhere, we could use that to make an article on the subject.
Yeah, that sounds about right to me. Of course, individual Wikipedia editors may want to set priorities for themselves.
-- Toby
Oliver Pereira wrote:
As I interpret it, it's saying that pretty much any subject could be covered - within the usual constraints of NPOV and verifiability, of course.
So we could include people and events that have not had significant impact on a global or even a national level, but which maybe only affected a small group of people. As long as there is some coverage in published sources, somewhere, we could use that to make an article on the subject.
That sounds about right to me. For example, the current Mayor of Athens, Georgia, U.S. I doubt if we have an article about that person, but I see no reason why we shouldn't.
I'm surprised we haven't had more fights about this sort of thing, but 'verifiability' seems to do a pretty good job of weeding out the really badly obscure.
--Jimbo
On Wed, 28 May 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
That sounds about right to me. For example, the current Mayor of Athens, Georgia, U.S. I doubt if we have an article about that person, but I see no reason why we shouldn't.
Okay, there's a bit of a fight over [[Sarah Marple-Cantrell]].
She's a 12-year-old girl who killed herself, and has a Web presence of little more than one local news article and one tribute site. So she's rather more obscure than the Mayor of Athens, Georgia, I expect. However, using Stan Shebs's "thousand-person rule", she could qualify. I'm sure everyone with a family member at her school (say 300ish pupils * 4 family members each) would have been affected by a suicide taking place in their school, and possibly a fair proportion of local people in Addison, Texas (pop. 14,166).
However, Erik's constraint that articles shouldn't be such that they will always remain stubs would probably disqualify it, if we accept his wish for articles to be 20,000 to 30,000 characters in length. It is currently less than 2,000 characters long. It could be expanded using the news article and whatever is sufficiently trustworthy on the tribute site, and padded with some relevant background about the school and neighbourhood and so on, but it would probably still be under 10,000 characters.
But isn't this length business just a matter of personal taste? Personally, I find long articles quite off-putting. [[Charles Darwin]], for example, only just barely qualifies as a decently sized article according to Erik, while I think it could do with being split into separate sections.
Clearly I don't have Erik's attention span. :) But do we *really* want articles that are over 10,000 characters long? And if so, why? I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds it a daunting task to try to edit long articles, especially if there is major restructuring to be done. If we want Wikipedia to be open to everyone, and easy to edit, I think we should seriously consider aiming for shorter articles everywhere. A reader who wants to read 30K of information about a subject would still be able to; they'd have to read three articles instead of one, maybe, but it would only involve two clicks of the mouse...
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
On Wed, 2003-05-28 at 14:56, Oliver Pereira wrote:
However, Erik's constraint that articles shouldn't be such that they will always remain stubs would probably disqualify it, if we accept his wish for articles to be 20,000 to 30,000 characters in length. It is currently less than 2,000 characters long. It could be expanded using the news article and whatever is sufficiently trustworthy on the tribute site, and padded with some relevant background about the school and neighbourhood and so on, but it would probably still be under 10,000 characters.
But isn't this length business just a matter of personal taste? Personally, I find long articles quite off-putting. [[Charles Darwin]], for example, only just barely qualifies as a decently sized article according to Erik, while I think it could do with being split into separate sections.
Clearly I don't have Erik's attention span. :) But do we *really* want articles that are over 10,000 characters long? And if so, why? I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds it a daunting task to try to edit long articles, especially if there is major restructuring to be done. If we want Wikipedia to be open to everyone, and easy to edit, I think we should seriously consider aiming for shorter articles everywhere. A reader who wants to read 30K of information about a subject would still be able to; they'd have to read three articles instead of one, maybe, but it would only involve two clicks of the mouse...
I, for one, strongly disagree with the Long-Entrians. I am a Atomizer. Short, interlinked entries are most appropriate for the medium, both in reading and editing.
(The Cunctator cunctator@kband.com):
I, for one, strongly disagree with the Long-Entrians. I am a Atomizer. Short, interlinked entries are most appropriate for the medium, both in reading and editing.
Ditto. A screenful or two is a fine article. 20-30k is huge. Nor do I have any problem with articles about local celebs or stories of local or otherwise limited interest, as long as they are clearly identified as such.
Oliver Pereira omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk writes:
But do we *really* want articles that are over 10,000 characters long?
Sure.
And if so, why?
As a reader I want info belonging together in oen article, I'm not that much interested in clicking around. I'm also not interested in download and reading and scrolling away all this navigation stuff.
Many a lot fragmented pages are only useful if you want to offer banner ads and stuff like that.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds it a daunting task to try to edit long articles, especially if there is major restructuring to be done.
This is a problem. My solution is to copy-and-paste centents into my editor, do the editing business (check it into my local CVS), and paste it back into the webbrowser for publishing.
Also, "fragment links" are not supported, you know, these "http://example/page.html#fragment" pointers.
If we want Wikipedia to be open to everyone, and easy to edit, I think we should seriously consider aiming for shorter articles everywhere. A reader who wants to read 30K of information about a subject would still be able to; they'd have to read three articles instead of one, maybe, but it would only involve two clicks of the mouse...
Don't worry too much, most articles start small...
(Karl Eichwalder ke@gnu.franken.de):
Also, "fragment links" are not supported, you know, these "http://example/page.html#fragment" pointers.
Actually they are; have been for a long time. But the ability to make the link _target_ has been disabled until we can agree on a better syntax for it.
My current favorite suggestion is that second-level headings (H2) should automatically become link targets.
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
(Karl Eichwalder ke@gnu.franken.de):
Also, "fragment links" are not supported, you know, these "http://example/page.html#fragment" pointers.
Actually they are; have been for a long time. But the ability to make the link _target_ has been disabled until we can agree on a better syntax for it.
My current favorite suggestion is that second-level headings (H2) should automatically become link targets.
I agree; this is the "obvious right thing" to do, in my opinion. We can now argue about whether we should support references for these anchors as [[article#fragment-text]], which also seems to be the "obvious thing" ?
What I can't decide is how I think these links should render into the page -- perhaps as "article; fragment-text"?
-- Neil
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Neil Harris wrote: | Lee Daniel Crocker wrote: |> |> My current favorite suggestion is that second-level headings (H2) |> should automatically become link targets. |> | I agree; this is the "obvious right thing" to do, in my opinion. We can | now argue about whether we should support references for these anchors | as [[article#fragment-text]], which also seems to be the "obvious thing" ? | | What I can't decide is how I think these links should render into the | page -- perhaps as "article; fragment-text"?
Another question immediately arises: how should a broken link be rendered? What HTML is generated by [[article#subhead]], if "article" exists but does not contain "subhead"?
- -- ~ Sean Barrett | Some of you may not return... ~ sean@epoptic.com | the rest of you definitely won't.
| What I can't decide is how I think these links should render into the | page -- perhaps as "article; fragment-text"?
Another question immediately arises: how should a broken link be rendered? What HTML is generated by [[article#subhead]], if "article" exists but does not contain "subhead"?
The latter question is really a no-brainer: the link is generated containing the fragment identifier, and is marked as broken or not solely based on whether or not the page exists. Browsers routinely accept links to non-existent fragments and just silently drop the fragment, going to the page.
The question of whether or not to include the fragment id in the default text is really one of style; I'm inclined to just drop it.
On Thu, 29 May 2003, Neil Harris wrote:
My current favorite suggestion is that second-level headings (H2) should automatically become link targets.
I agree; this is the "obvious right thing" to do, in my opinion. We can now argue about whether we should support references for these anchors as [[article#fragment-text]], which also seems to be the "obvious thing" ?
I think that the very idea of linking to sections within articles is the obvious *wrong* thing to do. The opening paragraph of an article is the thing that establishes the subject matter and the context - basically, what the article is all about. We can't just throw people into the middle of an article and expect them to know what's going on. They'll have to scroll back up to the top again anyway to check. If we don't want to just confuse people, we'd have to make each section pretty much self-contained. Hmm, a piece of writing that is self-contained and that you can link to. Sounds like an article to me! If a section is autonomous enough to be linked to, it is far more natural to separate it out and make it an article all by itself than to give it some strange new semi-article status.
I think this is a case of people looking for technical solutions to a problem that could be solved much more satisfactorily by sensible planning by humans.
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
Oliver Pereira wrote:
On Thu, 29 May 2003, Neil Harris wrote:
My current favorite suggestion is that second-level headings (H2) should automatically become link targets.
I agree; this is the "obvious right thing" to do, in my opinion. We can now argue about whether we should support references for these anchors as [[article#fragment-text]], which also seems to be the "obvious thing" ?
I think that the very idea of linking to sections within articles is the obvious *wrong* thing to do. The opening paragraph of an article is the thing that establishes the subject matter and the context - basically, what the article is all about. We can't just throw people into the middle of an article and expect them to know what's going on. They'll have to scroll back up to the top again anyway to check. If we don't want to just confuse people, we'd have to make each section pretty much self-contained. Hmm, a piece of writing that is self-contained and that you can link to. Sounds like an article to me! If a section is autonomous enough to be linked to, it is far more natural to separate it out and make it an article all by itself than to give it some strange new semi-article status.
I think this is a case of people looking for technical solutions to a problem that could be solved much more satisfactorily by sensible planning by humans.
Oliver
Oliver,
I can see your point of view. I can also see the other point of view. Both are sensible arguments, and I'm not sure which is right.
I feel that the design referred to is the "obvious right way" to do this, if you are going to do it at all. No-one will be (or should be) forced to use it, and it has the advantage that it can be made to degrade gracefully to simple article links.
It's worth giving a try. We can then explore the fuzzy space between "natural" articles and "natural" subsections, and see if it works. If it's a bad idea, the generation of links to fragments can simply be turned off, leaving the source intact, and links still linking to the correct articles. If we really hate it, we can even go so far as to programmatically remove the fragment tags from the article sources, and it will be as if it had never been.
Regards,
Neil
Oliver Pereira schrieb:
I think that the very idea of linking to sections within articles is the obvious *wrong* thing to do.
Thanks Oliver, I think you're absolutely right. And I'd like to add, as I did every time this discussion came up:
We'd need * a new colour for links to subheadings that don't exist, because the reader should know that the article exists, but the subheading doesn't. Readers won't get confused then, and editors know there's something to fix. * a "what links to this subheading" feature, because you might want to restructure an article and have to fix all the links accordingly. * a maintenance page for broken links to subheadings * subheading redirects * ...
This is really sick, because it frightens our editors, and they'll think twice before changing the structure of an article, which is a bad thing. It makes Wikipedia more static.
What we could do is generate a table of contents at the begining of an article, which consists of the subheadings and links to them. This would only make sense for very long articles, which IMO should better be split up. But others disagree.
Please don't allow linking to subheadings from outside an article!
Kurt
I think there is room for hundreds of thousands of appropriately short encyclopedia articles in the 100 to 1000 word range.
Fred
However, Erik's constraint that articles shouldn't be such that they will always remain stubs would probably disqualify it, if we accept his wish for articles to be 20,000 to 30,000 characters in length. It is currently less than 2,000 characters long. It could be expanded using the news article and whatever is sufficiently trustworthy on the tribute site, and padded with some relevant background about the school and neighbourhood and so on, but it would probably still be under 10,000 characters.
But isn't this length business just a matter of personal taste? Personally, I find long articles quite off-putting. [[Charles Darwin]], for example, only just barely qualifies as a decently sized article according to Erik, while I think it could do with being split into separate sections.
Clearly I don't have Erik's attention span. :) But do we *really* want articles that are over 10,000 characters long? And if so, why? I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds it a daunting task to try to edit long articles, especially if there is major restructuring to be done. If we want Wikipedia to be open to everyone, and easy to edit, I think we should seriously consider aiming for shorter articles everywhere. A reader who wants to read 30K of information about a subject would still be able to; they'd have to read three articles instead of one, maybe, but it would only involve two clicks of the mouse...
Oliver
--- Oliver Pereira omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote:
But isn't this length business just a matter of personal taste? Personally, I find long articles quite off-putting. [[Charles Darwin]], for example, only just barely qualifies as a decently sized article according to Erik, while I think it could do with being split into separate sections.
As Olivier, I agree. Length of an article is dictated by the subject matter of the article. I don't expect an article dealing with architecture in Paris to be short. Nor do I expect an article about Hollywood Blvd to be very long.
I think there is a trend here in the W to automate/codify most mundane things. This, I feel, is a trap. The W is different *because* it is written, edited, and massaged by humans beings.
I suggest also that while some rules might be good overall, some article will fall outside of the norm, and will have to be dealt with in a manner sensible to the subject.
===== Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com 818.943.1850 cell http://www.christophermahan.com/
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com
Oliver-
However, Erik's constraint that articles shouldn't be such that they will always remain stubs would probably disqualify it, if we accept his wish for articles to be 20,000 to 30,000 characters in length.
Let me rephrase my argument: A subject which cannot be covered in such detail should not have its own article. It should not be merged into another text if it can realistically grow to that size when relying on verifiable information. I think you understood it this way, but I'm not sure everyone else did.
The length itself is debatable, but I think most of us agree that we don't want one-paragraph texts about every single fictional character out there.
Long articles have several advantages: * A topic is kept in context, eliminating the need to write a separate intro for each individual article * It becomes easy to save, print and pass around an article covering all relevant information * We do not require the reader to click around unnecessarily, which can be confusing to many people * Should we decide on some major structural change or even a deletion, it becomes easier to fix things * The same goes for links: The less articles there are, the less double redirects, the less links that need to be manually edited and so on * A short average article length does not reflect well on our article count, which is one of the key instruments used for size comparisons
The arguments against long articles:
Hard to edit: One of the features on my personal wishlist is the ability to edit an individual article section. If you have this preference enabled (should be default for signed in users, off for anons) you get an "[edit]" link next to each article section headline, and this individual section can be loaded into the edit window. This makes it trivial to edit large articles.
No linkability to individual sections: Supporting a [[foo#bar]] style syntax is not the problem. However, keeping these links working is non-trivial. It might be desirable to only have this label functionality for some sections, instead of automatically turning every section title into a label.
Attention span: This is a valid argument, but splitting up articles is not the solution: instead of giving our reader easy access to the pertinent info, we now hide it with the justification that it is "too much to read". The solution is structure. Have a proper introduction with a decent summary, and put every relevant piece of information into the right section. We could try to develop guidelines for structuring articles in specific subject areas.
For some articles, splitting off specific points, e.g. long criticism discussions, may be desirable to avoid detracting from the main substance of the article. But this gets us into NPOV territory, and should be discussed for each individual article.
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote in part:
Long articles have several advantages:
- The same goes for links: The less articles there are, the less double
redirects, the less links that need to be manually edited and so on
Actually, I think that long articles will cause more redirects. Consider [[en:Neighbourhood (topology)]]. Since the only material on this topic is a short definition, it has no proper article but is listed on [[Topology glossary]]. So [[Neighbourhood (topology)]] redirects to [[Topology glossary]].
But what about [[Neighorhood (topology)]] (with the US spelling)? If I hadn't created this redirect as well, then somebody else might have come along (following a red link), redirected the alternate spelling to [[Neighbourhood (topology)]], seen (from the resulting blue link) that this page did indeed exist, but didn't look at it to discover that it was just a redirect.
Also, when [[Topology Glossary]] was moved to [[Topology glossary]], a whole bunch of double redirects were created -- two examples above.
Despite all of this, I *don't* think that [[Neighbourhood (topology)]] should be separated out. Not because a long article couldn't be written (it could, and I intend to write one when I get around to it, as I intend to write articles on every term in that glossary), but because the article would be only a single sentence *now*. I think that your 20KB suggestion is too long for a minimum size, like others here, but I do basically agree with your main point. I write this to emphasise that everybody -- in this situation and others -- should take time out to think about redirects and how the actions that we take may impact them or require them.
-- Toby
On 29 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:
Long articles have several advantages:
- A topic is kept in context, eliminating the need to write a separate
intro for each individual article
The context depends on the reader. What is the context of Chap's views on Stuff? For someone interested in the life of Chap, the relevant context is his life, and so they would want that section to be at [[Chap]]. For someone interested in Stuff, the relevant context is that subject, and so they would want the section to be at [[Stuff]]. Of course, there should be mentions of his views in both articles, but to duplicate the whole lot would cause problems. I think it would be better to have a separate article on [[Chap's views on Stuff]], and have links to it from both articles.
- It becomes easy to save, print and pass around an article covering all
relevant information
Hmm. Keep Wikipedia articles as close to paper as possible, for ease of conversion into paper. ;) Okay, maybe that's an unfair characterisation of what you said, but I think that Web-based things should be tailored to the medium, and that means that information should be arranged in a web-like structure, not artificially forced into a one-dimensional structure like traditional writing. It would be good to have a way to save related articles together, but what is related depends on the reader, again. A reader interested in Chap would want [[Chap]], [[Chap's views on Stuff]], and [[Chap's views on Things]] saved together, whereas a reader interested in Stuff would want [[Stuff]], [[Chap's views on Stuff]], and [[Guy's views on Stuff]] all saved together. I expect a technical solution could be thought up to enable readers to group articles for saving together, according to their personal preferences. :)
- We do not require the reader to click around unnecessarily, which can be
confusing to many people
I'm not sure I follow this argument. Isn't that what people do on the Web all the time?
- Should we decide on some major structural change or even a deletion, it
becomes easier to fix things
- The same goes for links: The less articles there are, the less double
redirects, the less links that need to be manually edited and so on
I don't think so. Merging small articles into big ones increases the number of redirects floating around.
- A short average article length does not reflect well on our article
count, which is one of the key instruments used for size comparisons
It makes the count bigger, which is a *good* thing. :) As for comparisons, if you check other popular encyclopaedias, you'll find that many of them have articles a lot shorter than 20 Kb.
The arguments against long articles:
Hard to edit: One of the features on my personal wishlist is the ability to edit an individual article section.
Doesn't that give the reader more unnecessary things to click on, and wouldn't that be confusing to many people? ;)
No linkability to individual sections: Supporting a [[foo#bar]] style syntax is not the problem. However, keeping these links working is non-trivial. It might be desirable to only have this label functionality for some sections, instead of automatically turning every section title into a label.
The whole idea of linking to individual sections is just so evil that I'm going to have to write another whole e-mail on this subject...
Attention span: This is a valid argument, but splitting up articles is not the solution: instead of giving our reader easy access to the pertinent info, we now hide it with the justification that it is "too much to read". The solution is structure. Have a proper introduction with a decent summary, and put every relevant piece of information into the right section. We could try to develop guidelines for structuring articles in specific subject areas.
The solution *is* structure. We agree on that. I say use the natural web-like structure of the Web; you say force things into a traditional book-like structure. I say the latter is more off-putting for all those people with short attention spans, who would be, I believe, the majority of potential readers.
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
Oliver Pereira omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk writes:
It makes the count bigger, which is a *good* thing. :) As for comparisons, if you check other popular encyclopaedias, you'll find that many of them have articles a lot shorter than 20 Kb.
Those probably are toys.
Yes, short articles are okay as well (it depends on the subject). Allowing short articles does not mean the article on Shakespeare, say, should consist of 1001 fragments (I didn't read the article on S., though...).
Discussing these issue in general is worthless.
Oliver-
On 29 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:
Long articles have several advantages:
- A topic is kept in context, eliminating the need to write a separate
intro for each individual article
The context depends on the reader. What is the context of Chap's views on Stuff? For someone interested in the life of Chap, the relevant context is his life, and so they would want that section to be at [[Chap]]. For someone interested in Stuff, the relevant context is that subject, and so they would want the section to be at [[Stuff]]. Of course, there should be mentions of his views in both articles, but to duplicate the whole lot would cause problems. I think it would be better to have a separate article on [[Chap's views on Stuff]], and have links to it from both articles.
I would prefer to have
=Chap==
'''Chap''' is ...
== Chap's views on [[Stuff]] ==
Okay, maybe that's an unfair characterisation of what you said, but I think that Web-based things should be tailored to the medium, and that means that information should be arranged in a web-like structure, not artificially forced into a one-dimensional structure like traditional writing.
It is. Wikipedia articles have more links than any other encyclopedia. Compare Wikipedia to Encarta, an electronic encyclopedia, and you will notice that we will have much more cross-references, often to completely off-topical articles. I think that's a good thing and allows readers to explore freely (don't get me started about link underlining again, though). It separates us from Encarta, though, who have obviously done a great deal of usability research.
The question is, do we want relevant information on one subject to be grouped together, or do we want to *unnecessarily* use the "hypertext medium" just for kicks? The latter seems like a gimmicky thing to do, and reminds me more of a project like Everything2. By doing so, we do not accomodate but actually encourage short attention spans, with lots of disjointed small articles. Remember that for each link the reader has to follow, he needs to develop an idea what that link is about, and whether he wants to read it, whereas it is much easier to skim a well-structured text in front of you based on section titles.
(BTW, it may be nice to have a small table of contents auto-generated for articles with more than 4-5 sections.)
I do believe writing a well structured coherent long article is more difficult than writing many small ones. I still think we should try.
It would be good to have a way to save related articles together, but what is related depends on the reader, again. A reader interested in Chap would want [[Chap]], [[Chap's views on Stuff]], and [[Chap's views on Things]] saved together, whereas a reader interested in Stuff would want [[Stuff]], [[Chap's views on Stuff]], and [[Guy's views on Stuff]] all saved together.
There will always be differences in what is perceived as belonging together. However, where coherence is reasonably clear, it should be reflected by having relevant information merged into a single document. For example, I left some fictional characters alone because these appeared in several different fictional realms. So it would not have been useful to have them just in one article, because that would complicate linkability, saving etc. -- but for those characters which just appear in one realm, having them in the article about that realm is preferable.
- We do not require the reader to click around unnecessarily, which can
be
confusing to many people
I'm not sure I follow this argument. Isn't that what people do on the Web all the time?
One of the key problems of empirical web design is link predictability. If the reader does not know what to expect, he will get confused, frustrated and stop navigating. Obviously, the smaller your information pieces are, the more frequently the reader will have to find the proper link to navigate to the next one, and the more likely it is that he will get frustrated in the process. With too long documents, you risk having too much uninteresting information in the same file, making the text harder to skim etc. So finding the right balance is important. With lots of highly interlinked short articles, you get a structure like Everything2, which only appeals to very strange persons.
I don't think so. Merging small articles into big ones increases the number of redirects floating around.
Replacing all redirects to FOO with redirects to BAR is a job for a machine. Replacing all links to FOO with links to BAR is a job for a human, because you don't know in which verbal context these links appear.
- A short average article length does not reflect well on our article
count, which is one of the key instruments used for size comparisons
It makes the count bigger, which is a *good* thing. :)
No, it's not a good thing, if the next time someone does a random page sample for a review, they get 10 one-pargraph articles about fictional characters. This makes us look unprofessional.
And the more such articles we have, the more difficult it becomes to enforce standards, to systematically copyedit articles about certain subjects etc. -- like Everything2, the whole database becomes increasingly messsy and unappealing to deal with. It's like the subpages mess we just barely avoided.
As for comparisons, if you check other popular encyclopaedias, you'll find that many of them have articles a lot shorter than 20 Kb.
Certainly not about "Gnipper the dog". The point is: If you actually check out these articles, you notice that they are about subjects that can quite plausibly grow into reasonably long articles -- an author, a politician, a company spokesperson; a mechanical device, a philosophical concept, a published work .. We currently have plenty of small articles that can never be anything but small articles because their subjects are so insignificant.
Hard to edit: One of the features on my personal wishlist is the ability to edit an individual article section.
Doesn't that give the reader more unnecessary things to click on, and wouldn't that be confusing to many people? ;)
Not for the reader, but for the editor. Editors can be expected to click more, but even for them, it should be a user preference to avoid confusion.
The whole idea of linking to individual sections is just so evil that I'm going to have to write another whole e-mail on this subject...
Actually, I tend to agree with you on that one.
The solution *is* structure. We agree on that. I say use the natural web-like structure of the Web; you say force things into a traditional book-like structure.
No, I don't say that. I say use both: traditional structural elements and associative web structure, to allow getting relevant coherent information quickly. Wikipedia is not a hypertext experiment.
I don't know how much we disagree in practice. As long as you don't move Chip 'n Dale and all their fictional supporting characters back to their individual articles, I'm happy.
Regards,
Erik
On 30 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:
I don't know how much we disagree in practice. As long as you don't move Chip 'n Dale and all their fictional supporting characters back to their individual articles, I'm happy.
Okay, okay, we don't really disagree as much as my message may have suggested. I don't like Everything2, either. ;)
And don't worry, I won't be moving those fictional supporting characters back to their individual articles. To be honest, I haven't even looked at any of the articles that you've brought up as examples, so you're probably safe there. :)
I really don't like "== Chap's views on [[Stuff]] ==", though. Links in headings look ugly... The opening sentence of that section should mention Stuff anyway, and I think the link would look nicer there.
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
Erik Moeller wrote:
Oliver Pereira wrote:
I think that Web-based things should be tailored to the medium, and that means that information should be arranged in a web-like structure.
The question is, do we want relevant information on one subject to be grouped together, or do we want to *unnecessarily* use the "hypertext medium" just for kicks? The latter seems like a gimmicky thing to do,
Well of course it does, because it's a strawman (uninentionally on your part, I'm sure). Oliver doesn't want to use the medium for *kicks* -- even the people that worked on [[Gnipper]] (below) weren't doing that.
I don't think so. Merging small articles into big ones increases the number of redirects floating around.
Replacing all redirects to FOO with redirects to BAR is a job for a machine. Replacing all links to FOO with links to BAR is a job for a human, because you don't know in which verbal context these links appear.
I don't understand this comment. Can you give an example (possibly hypothetical) of a situation where you can contrast the effects of the different designs?
Erik Moeller wrote:
- A short average article length does not reflect well on our article
count, which is one of the key instruments used for size comparisons
It makes the count bigger, which is a *good* thing. :)
No, it's not a good thing, if the next time someone does a random page sample for a review, they get 10 one-pargraph articles about fictional characters. This makes us look unprofessional.
Agh, everybody forget how we *look*. We worry far too much about our article count and Randompage. When I first discovered Wikipedia, I noticed two things: wiki and 'pedia. We should stick to the subject, which is usability for readers and writers: that's what'll attract people to the site and make us look professional.
And the more such articles we have, the more difficult it becomes to enforce standards, to systematically copyedit articles about certain subjects etc. -- like Everything2, the whole database becomes increasingly messsy and unappealing to deal with. It's like the subpages mess we just barely avoided.
But another problem with subpages is still present. That problem was that we didn't know if it was best to structure things as [[Stuff/Chap's views]] or [[Chap/Views on Stuff]]. By placing all of Chap's views on Stuff in [[Chap]], you choose the latter. By keeping [[Chap's views on Stuff]] separate, Oliver avoids the problem.
In practice, things will of course depend on the situation. As you said, you and Oliver probably aren't that far apart in practice, and I'm probably smooshed somewhere in the small space between you. But when the section == Views on Stuff == or == Chap's views == (as the case may be) becomes long enough to stand on its own, then I believe that it's often best to give it its own article, with a brief summary (probably without header) in both [[Chap]] and [[Stuff]]. (I won't replace "often" with "always" in that sentence, however.)
I said before that I agreed with your main point, because I thought that you were talking about things (like [[Gnipper]]) that are very short and would be only a single paragraph in an article. But I disagree if you're talking about things of the size of subheaders, or at least I'll disagree in many cases.
As for comparisons, if you check other popular encyclopaedias, you'll find that many of them have articles a lot shorter than 20 Kb.
Certainly not about "Gnipper the dog". The point is: If you actually check out these articles, you notice that they are about subjects that can quite plausibly grow into reasonably long articles -- an author, a politician, a company spokesperson; a mechanical device, a philosophical concept, a published work .. We currently have plenty of small articles that can never be anything but small articles because their subjects are so insignificant.
For a published encyclopaedia, which is a finished work, I don't think that the ability to grow into a long article makes any difference for their purposes one way or another. That does have some relevance to us, but not to them. Rather, they don't have [[Gnipper]] -- even as a redirect! -- because they don't consider that character significant enough. We, OTOH, are not paper, and it's significant enough if somebody writes it.
That doesn't mean that [[Gnipper]] should have its own article -- that depends on circumstances, and in this case it shouldn't, since we simply don't have enough material to stand on its own (regardless of whether such might ''potentially'' be available!). It does mean that we can stick in a redirect, however, and thus the distinction between us and EB is maintained.
IOW, for them, it's not about size at all, but significance. Since we're not paper, we care only about size (replacing significance to some extent with verifiability) -- and I agree with you about [[Gnipper]] on that basis of course! -- but comparisons with EB really have little significance, for one side or the other, in this matter.
-- Toby
Toby-
The question is, do we want relevant information on one subject to be grouped together, or do we want to *unnecessarily* use the "hypertext medium" just for kicks? The latter seems like a gimmicky thing to do,
Well of course it does, because it's a strawman (uninentionally on your part, I'm sure). Oliver doesn't want to use the medium for *kicks* -- even the people that worked on [[Gnipper]] (below) weren't doing that.
So far I have not seen any solid arguments for the practice of having many small, interlinked articles, other than "it's the web". This is why I am referring to that practice as "just for kicks". That's not a straw man, but it can be refuted by showing such arguments.
I don't think so. Merging small articles into big ones increases the number of redirects floating around.
Replacing all redirects to FOO with redirects to BAR is a job for a machine. Replacing all links to FOO with links to BAR is a job for a human, because you don't know in which verbal context these links appear.
I don't understand this comment. Can you give an example (possibly hypothetical) of a situation where you can contrast the effects of the different designs?
OK, let's say you have [[Characters in Atlas Shrugged]], and for each of these characters you have a redirect on their page (e.g. [[John Galt]]) to the [[Characters ..]] page, so that they can be linked to.
Now let's say we move [[Characters in Atlas Shrugged]] to [[Characters of Atlas Shrugged]]. Whoops, now we have lots of double redirects for each of the individual characters, and need to change the redirs. But this can be done using a single DB query:
UPDATE cur SET cur_text="#REDIRECT [[Characters of Atlas Shrugged]]" where cur_text="#REDIRECT [[Characters in Atlas Shrugged]]";
On the other hand, let's say you have
[[Don Conway]] [[Eddie Willers]] [[Ellis Wyatt]] [[Hank Rearden]] ...
as individual articles, which all point to [[Atlas Shrugged]]. Turns out that Ayn Rand actually called her book "Worship Me" and "Atlas Shrugged" was just the working title. So we now need to fix all those links, but because of the different context they can appear in, this may not be possible with a DB query.
In general, having lots of small articles requires us to have lots of real links (not just redirects) to tie them together, which may need to be updated at some point. And this can get very messy. There's other stuff, like the redundant intro texts which may need to be changed etc.
Agh, everybody forget how we *look*.
No. It may not be essential, but it is important. And how we look reflects on what we are (yeah, very deep, I know). If we consider every Gnipper relevant enough to get his own article, that says something about our standards of significance, too.
But another problem with subpages is still present. That problem was that we didn't know if it was best to structure things as [[Stuff/Chap's views]] or [[Chap/Views on Stuff]]. By placing all of Chap's views on Stuff in [[Chap]], you choose the latter. By keeping [[Chap's views on Stuff]] separate, Oliver avoids the problem.
As I said, where the situation is ambivalent, I agree that having a separate page may be a better solution.
For a published encyclopaedia, which is a finished work, I don't think that the ability to grow into a long article makes any difference for their purposes one way or another.
That does have some relevance to us, but not to them. Rather, they don't have [[Gnipper]] -- even as a redirect! -- because they don't consider that character significant enough.
Whether an article can theoretically grow is a somewhat counter-intuitive way to *determine* significance, even for a non-dynamic encyclopedia. My policy suggestion could also be phrased as "Insigificant subjects should not have their own articles but instead be merged into longer ones", but that's more vague and can perhaps be perceived as condescending ("Gnipper is no unsigificant! He's the best dog EVER!").
Regards,
Erik
I had decided to drop this, but I don't think it really ever got to addressing the point I was interested in, so I'll carry on...
On 31 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:
So far I have not seen any solid arguments for the practice of having many small, interlinked articles, other than "it's the web". This is why I am referring to that practice as "just for kicks". That's not a straw man, but it can be refuted by showing such arguments.
Yes, you have seen such arguments. You even laid out the arguments against long (20 - 30 Kb) articles in a nice list for us a few days ago:
1. Hard to edit 2. No linkability to individual sections 3. Attention span
You mentioned a possible technical solution for the first one (ability to edit individual sections), although this missed my point, which was that it was difficult to *restructure* large articles, rather than to edit within a pre-existing structure.
You mentioned a possible technical solution to the second one, but then when I objected to linking to individual sections, you said, "Actually, I tend to agree with you on that one." :)
You said the third one was "a valid argument", but that it could be solved by proper structuring of the information. I agreed, but we disagreed on what that proper structuring was. Except that in some circumstances, "splitting off specific points, e.g. long criticism discussions, may be desirable to avoid detracting from the main substance of the article", in which case we agree.
So all three arguments still stand, to some degree.
No. It may not be essential, but it is important. And how we look reflects on what we are (yeah, very deep, I know). If we consider every Gnipper relevant enough to get his own article, that says something about our standards of significance, too.
You have brought up these obscure fictional characters quite a few times in this discussion now. This is a straw man argument if ever I saw one. No-one on the mailing list has ever stated that they want an article on [[Gnipper]] and his friends, as far as I can recall.
If you will recall, I brought up the subject of article length in the context of a 1,400 character article about a person, and I asked if it really mattered if it was always going to remain under 10,000 bytes. That's how this thing started. So please stop bringing up those damned cartoon dogs, and tell me: is there any way of integrating a biographical article into a larger one, without most of the information either seeming out of place, or being omitted altogether?
My new test case is [[Cyrus Cantrell]], an example less likely to provoke distracting emotional responses than the previous one - ignoring the genealogical connection. Dr. Cantrell is a not especially well-known academic in the field of engineering, who has done research in [[photonics]]. Assuming that no-one ever expands his article up to 20,000 characters (which seems likely), do you propose merging his article into another one? Possibly into [[photonics]], or into a new article for the research centre he heads? Both of these would require omitting some biographical material not directly relevant to his work - we don't generally give people's full names, qualifications, and a list of posts they hold if we're only mentioning them in the context of a larger subject, so information would be lost. What do you propose?
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
My example would be [[Baltzar von Platen]], an excellent example of a short article that stands alone with useful and interesting links.
Fred
My new test case is [[Cyrus Cantrell]], an example less likely to provoke distracting emotional responses than the previous one - ignoring the genealogical connection. Dr. Cantrell is a not especially well-known academic in the field of engineering, who has done research in [[photonics]]. Assuming that no-one ever expands his article up to 20,000 characters (which seems likely), do you propose merging his article into another one? Possibly into [[photonics]], or into a new article for the research centre he heads? Both of these would require omitting some biographical material not directly relevant to his work - we don't generally give people's full names, qualifications, and a list of posts they hold if we're only mentioning them in the context of a larger subject, so information would be lost. What do you propose?
Oliver
Fred-
My example would be [[Baltzar von Platen]], an excellent example of a short article that stands alone with useful and interesting links.
This is not an article. It's a disambiguation page that is not in the proper form.
Regards,
Erik
On Saturday, 31st May 2003, at 19:53, Erik Moeller wrote:
Fred-
My example would be [[Baltzar von Platen]], an excellent example of a short article that stands alone with useful and interesting links.
This is not an article. It's a disambiguation page that is not in the proper form.
Indeed, but when he posted the link, it was to what is now located at [[Baltzar von Platen (1898-1984)]]. Such is the Wikipedia, after all. Perhaps one could look at the page's history, but...
[Snip]
Yours,
James-
Indeed, but when he posted the link, it was to what is now located at [[Baltzar von Platen (1898-1984)]]. Such is the Wikipedia, after all. Perhaps one could look at the page's history, but...
Aha.
I don't know about that von Platen's historical significance, and the article certainly doesn't give me a good idea of it. The way it stands right now, I would prefer the relevant information to be moved to an article about the [[gas absorption refrigerator]], especially since much of it does not refer to the person but to the historical context:
"In 1923 production by AB Arctic began. In 1925 AB Arctic was purchased by Electrolux which began selling them worldwide. Servel purchased rights to manufacture the refrigerator in 1925 and was the only U.S. manufacturer for many years."
If all von Platen is famous for is his participation in the development of refrigerators, then no, I do not think he necessarily needs his own article. That's what redirects are for.
Regards,
Erik
But does information about a person who was important in the history of the production of artificial diamonds belong in an article on gas absorption refrigerators?
The point is that Baltzar von Platen (both of them) did significant things during their lives but not enough to justify more than a few words in an encyclopedic work. But both did several significant things during their life and can not be reasonably be put into some other article.
The first one build a canal but was found also in the list of prime ministers of Norway.
Neither (based on information I have now) justify an extensive article of the 20,000 word sort, but do justify articles in the 100 to 500 word range.
Fred
From: erik_moeller@gmx.de (Erik Moeller) Reply-To: wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org Date: 01 Jun 2003 07:14:00 +0200 To: wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] An Excellent Short Article was Limits to the non-paperiness of Wikipedia?
James-
Indeed, but when he posted the link, it was to what is now located at [[Baltzar von Platen (1898-1984)]]. Such is the Wikipedia, after all. Perhaps one could look at the page's history, but...
Aha.
I don't know about that von Platen's historical significance, and the article certainly doesn't give me a good idea of it. The way it stands right now, I would prefer the relevant information to be moved to an article about the [[gas absorption refrigerator]], especially since much of it does not refer to the person but to the historical context:
"In 1923 production by AB Arctic began. In 1925 AB Arctic was purchased by Electrolux which began selling them worldwide. Servel purchased rights to manufacture the refrigerator in 1925 and was the only U.S. manufacturer for many years."
If all von Platen is famous for is his participation in the development of refrigerators, then no, I do not think he necessarily needs his own article. That's what redirects are for.
Regards,
Erik _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Fred-
But does information about a person who was important in the history of the production of artificial diamonds belong in an article on gas absorption refrigerators?
Well, since he left the project before it succeeded, it is arguable whether it belongs there at all; but if it is to be included, it could as well briefly be mentioned in an article about diamond synthesis. However, if his contributions are significant, then it is realistically possible to write a lot more about them, so having a short article as a placeholder for a longer one is OK.
Simply put: If the person is relatively unimportant in the great scheme of things, it would not be surprising to see in a traditional encyclopedia
See: ''refrigerator'', ''diamond synthesis''
In Wikipedia, the analogy would be a redirect to the page if it is a single one. But if the person turns up in too many different contexts for that to be workable, it is of course OK to have an article about them, even if it doesn't grow into a lengthy essay. I believe these cases to be relatively rare exceptions compared to the hundreds of always-will-be stub articles that are created every month.
Regards,
Erik
Oliver-
So far I have not seen any solid arguments for the practice of having many small, interlinked articles, other than "it's the web". This is why I am referring to that practice as "just for kicks". That's not a straw man, but it can be refuted by showing such arguments.
Yes, you have seen such arguments.
I have seen solid arguments for splitting *some* articles up, because of the linkability issue. Articles should only be split up to the point where linking to individual sections is necessary and this cannot be accomplished through redirects. They can also be split up where a section is likely to be relevant in many different contexts, in which case it probably also fulfills my "can be expanded" criterion. And I agree that long discussions that distract from the substance of the article should be moved elsewhere, but again, these will probably fufill my length criterion.
I do not agree with Fred Bauder, on the other hand, who feels that there should be *many* small articles. The above arguments are applicable to exceptions, and even in these cases, we are splitting articles into smaller ones which can, hopefully in most cases, realistically be expanded.
You have brought up these obscure fictional characters quite a few times in this discussion now. This is a straw man argument if ever I saw one. No-one on the mailing list has ever stated that they want an article on [[Gnipper]] and his friends, as far as I can recall.
Well, at this point I can't really read minds yet, so I don't know if the people who supported having short articles would or would not want articles about fictional characters. But I'm happy to know that you don't like the little bastard either.
My new test case is [[Cyrus Cantrell]], an example less likely to provoke distracting emotional responses than the previous one - ignoring the genealogical connection. Dr. Cantrell is a not especially well-known academic in the field of engineering, who has done research in [[photonics]]. Assuming that no-one ever expands his article up to 20,000 characters (which seems likely)
No, of course that article should not be merged into another one. I believe I used the words "If an article can realistically be expanded ..". I think this article can quite realistically be expanded to 20-30K, even if nobody will ever do it. It mentions that Cyrus Cantrell wrote over 100 papers, for example. What are they, which ones are relevant? Why did he get into photonics? Etc. etc.
For my favorite example Gnipper, on the other hand, it seems unlikely that we really want the kind of information that *could* blow this article up to massive proportions, since most of it would probably come from Internet fandom and as such have the stigma of low verifiability. So the article about Gnipper could still "conceivably" get very long, but in my opinion not "realistically". This is an important distinction.
Regards,
Erik
On 31 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:
Well, at this point I can't really read minds yet, so I don't know if the people who supported having short articles would or would not want articles about fictional characters. But I'm happy to know that you don't like the little bastard either.
Okay. I'm sorry for dismissing your examples about fictional characters so rudely. To be honest, this was a bit hypocritical of me. I am, after all, responsible for [[Tails]]. I will sort that out, though, one way or the other. Eventually. Honest...
But then again, I see from the edit history of [[Knuckles the Echidna]] that you have visited that page a few times, and haven't merged that into [[Sonic the Hedgehog]], so maybe you're more lenient on Sonic the Hedgehog characters... ;)
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
Oliver-
But then again, I see from the edit history of [[Knuckles the Echidna]] that you have visited that page a few times, and haven't merged that into [[Sonic the Hedgehog]], so maybe you're more lenient on Sonic the Hedgehog characters... ;)
Actually, there's been substantial controversy regarding [[Knuckles the Echidna in Sonic the Hedgehog 2]], so I thought I'd leave the main article alone to avoid starting another flamewar. Just so you don't think I give preferential treatment to Sega characters. ;-)
Anyway, I think we should try to develop a somewhat coherent policy out of our discussion. I'll try to make a start once I find the time.
On another note, I think it really is time for email clients to support wiki syntax ... those [[..]] links are just too damn useful.
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
For my favorite example Gnipper, on the other hand, it seems unlikely that we really want the kind of information that *could* blow this article up to massive proportions, since most of it would probably come from Internet fandom and as such have the stigma of low verifiability. So the article about Gnipper could still "conceivably" get very long, but in my opinion not "realistically". This is an important distinction.
We can test the thousand-person rule on this - if there are thousands of fan pages, then at least there is the phenomenon of the thousands of pages to talk about, and one could summarize that. "Gnipper" by itself garners 579 Google hits (with Wikipedia entry as #1, hmm), but most are non-comic-strip; "gnipper gnasher" only turns up relevant hints, but there are just 34. Given a likely ratio of readers to web posters, there are probably a few thousand people who care about Gnipper, and so it squeaks by. But I tried "gnorah" and there were exactly two refs not in Wikipedia, and so I would say the mere mention of Gnorah in Wikipedia makes it the most comprehensive encyclopedia in the world (at least on the subject of Gnasher and Gnipper :-) ), and there's no good reason for a Gnorah article.
Stan
Erik Moeller wrote in part:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote in part:
Replacing all redirects to FOO with redirects to BAR is a job for a machine. Replacing all links to FOO with links to BAR is a job for a human, because you don't know in which verbal context these links appear.
I don't understand this comment. Can you give an example (possibly hypothetical) of a situation where you can contrast the effects of the different designs?
OK, let's say you have [[Characters in Atlas Shrugged]], and for each of these characters you have a redirect on their page (e.g. [[John Galt]]) to the [[Characters ..]] page, so that they can be linked to.
Now let's say we move [[Characters in Atlas Shrugged]] to [[Characters of Atlas Shrugged]]. Whoops, now we have lots of double redirects for each of the individual characters, and need to change the redirs. But this can be done using a single DB query: UPDATE cur SET cur_text="#REDIRECT [[Characters of Atlas Shrugged]]" where cur_text="#REDIRECT [[Characters in Atlas Shrugged]]".
On the other hand, let's say you have [[Don Conway]] [[Eddie Willers]] [[Ellis Wyatt]] [[Hank Rearden]] ... as individual articles, which all point to [[Atlas Shrugged]]. Turns out that Ayn Rand actually called her book "Worship Me" and "Atlas Shrugged" was just the working title. So we now need to fix all those links, but because of the different context they can appear in, this may not be possible with a DB query.
Ah, so it'll be a lot easier to make a small change using your system that to make a big change using Oliver's system. No surprise there!
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. Then we decide to move that to [[Characters of Atlas Shrugged]]. In that case, all of the links to [[Characters in Atlas Shrugged]] can be left just as they are -- even easier to fix than with your system! (Another possibility under Oliver's system, of course, is that there's no [[Characters in Atlas Shrugged]] at all, but comparing *that* would be quite unfair to you!)
Alternatively, let's suppose that you have [[Characters in Atlas Shrugged]] but discover that the title is really "Worship Me" and not "Atlas Shrugged". Then you'll have to change not *only* the links in that article -- that's just the tip of the iceberg -- but *every* reference to the title. If the individual character articles are reasonably long (where I agree with those that think 1KB is sufficient reason), then this will be about the same (large) amount of work under your system as under Oliver's system. OTOH, if the individual character articles are rather short -- well, in that case I agree with you already, keep them together.
(Of course, it's unfair of me to say "Oliver's system", since he doesn't contend that fictional characters must *always* have individual articles, however short. Unfortunately, nobody is advocating that position, so there's no one else to name such a system after!)
In general, having lots of small articles requires us to have lots of real links (not just redirects) to tie them together, which may need to be updated at some point. And this can get very messy. There's other stuff, like the redundant intro texts which may need to be changed etc.
In general, about the same amount of text appears under either system --a assuming that the articles to break off aren't very short -- so about the same amount of work will be need either way.
I do agree now that you have another argument that very short articles shouldn't be separated when they can reasonably be combined into one longer article. I've always agreed with you about that.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that conversion from Oliver's system to your also creates double redirects. This shouldn't affect ultimate policy decisions, but anybody undergoing such a conversion should remember that. (I fixed these for the case of [[Dennis the Menace]].)
And how we look reflects on what we are (yeah, very deep, I know). If we consider every Gnipper relevant enough to get his own article, that says something about our standards of significance, too.
Yes, it does, and we've already decided our standards of significance: Gnipper *is* significant enough. Thus we have an article on him. To be sure, we have no article *exclusively* on him, but that's not at all because we believe him to be insignificant. Rather, it's because all of the material that we have on him fits quite well inside [[Gnasher and Gnipper]], which is where [[Gnipper]] (an article that still exists!) redirects.
Whether an article can theoretically grow is a somewhat counter-intuitive way to *determine* significance, even for a non-dynamic encyclopedia. My policy suggestion could also be phrased as "Insigificant subjects should not have their own articles but instead be merged into longer ones", but that's more vague and can perhaps be perceived as condescending ("Gnipper is no unsigificant! He's the best dog EVER!").
So is your proposed policy about potential length or significance? You phrase it in terms of potential length normally, while you phrase it in terms of significance here, yet you seem to agree that the former doesn't measure the latter well.
I agree with you that significance is a vauge criterion. Luckily, Wikipedia is not paper, so we don't have to judge that. (We do have to judge *verifiability*, of course -- insignificant topics have been removed on that ground.) We shouldn't have any policy regarding significance, although individual contributors may well wish to budget their time and choose their priorities on such grounds.
OTOH, length (but not necessarily *potential* length) goes directly to the problem with redirects that you mentioned above. It also goes to the other points that you made in your main post (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-May/010396.html), which I still agree with when applied to articles the size of [[Gnipper]].
-- Toby
PS: Do you have any objection to [[en:Sarah Marple-Cantrell]], the example that got Oliver started on all this? I'm trying to see if you two (and I) disagree about any specific case, or if you only disagree about the various hypothetical cases that have been brought up.
Toby-
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. I want an article that contains a *description of the characters* without all the details. If anything changes, we can just do a search/replace in that single text, instead of doing it on dozens of pages. Only for the most important characters separate articles may be appropriate (e.g. in a [[Disney character]] discussion, [[Donald Duck]] would be linked to, whereas [[Lil Bad Wolf]] would be described on the page).
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.
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.
Whether an article can theoretically grow is a somewhat counter-intuitive way to *determine* significance, even for a non-dynamic encyclopedia. My policy suggestion could also be phrased as "Insigificant subjects should not have their own articles but instead be merged into longer ones", but that's more vague and can perhaps be perceived as condescending ("Gnipper is no unsigificant! He's the best dog EVER!").
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.
PS: 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.
Regards,
Erik
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>?
... but I think that Web-based things should be tailored to the medium, and that means that information should be arranged in a web-like structure, not artificially forced into a one-dimensional structure like traditional writing. It would be good to have a way to save related articles together, but what is related depends on the reader, again. A reader interested in Chap would want [[Chap]], [[Chap's views on Stuff]], and [[Chap's views on Things]] saved together, whereas a reader interested in Stuff would want [[Stuff]], [[Chap's views on Stuff]], and [[Guy's views on Stuff]] all saved together. I expect a technical solution could be thought up to enable readers to group articles for saving together, according to their personal preferences. :)
- We do not require the reader to click around unnecessarily, which can
be confusing to many people
I'm not sure I follow this argument. Isn't that what people do on the Web all the time?
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. 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. 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)
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.
Uli
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
I wrote in part:
Ulrich Fuchs wrote:
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.
Interestingly, the EB page that Ulrich links to above *is* more or less a link list -- unlike our articles!
-- Toby
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