Oliver- 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

Oliver Pereira wrote in part: Yeah, that sounds about right to me. Of course, individual Wikipedia editors may want to set priorities for themselves. -- Toby

Oliver Pereira 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. 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, 2003-05-28 at 14:56, Oliver Pereira wrote: 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.

Oliver Pereira &lt;omp199(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk&gt; writes: Sure. 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. 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. Don't worry too much, most articles start small... -- | ,__o http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | _-\_<, ke(a)suse.de (work) / keichwa(a)gmx.net (home) | (*)/'(*)

I think there is room for hundreds of thousands of appropriately short encyclopedia articles in the 100 to 1000 word range. Fred

Oliver- 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

-----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(a)epoptic.com | the rest of you definitely won't.

Erik Moeller wrote in part: 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 Thu, 29 May 2003, Neil Harris wrote: 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(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+

Oliver- I would prefer to have =Chap== '''Chap''' is ... == Chap's views on [[Stuff]] == 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. 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. be 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Actually, I tend to agree with you on that one. 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

Oliver- Only if you underline them ;-)

Oliver Pereira schrieb: 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 wrote in small part: Heh. The US spelling does, of course, include the "B". ^_^ -- Toby

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

My example would be [[Baltzar von Platen]], an excellent example of a short article that stands alone with useful and interesting links. Fred

Oliver- 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. 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. 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

James- 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

Fred- 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

On 31 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote: 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(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+

Oliver- 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

Toby- 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). 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. 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. 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. 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

I wrote in part: Interestingly, the EB page that Ulrich links to above *is* more or less a link list -- unlike our articles! -- Toby