I agree with the point that the Year in Review articles are "space limited" in a sense, but I don't see what's wrong with Toby's solution: let the articles grow until they get too big, then unload the less important stuff to something like [[Books published in 1962]], of course linked to from [[1962]]. The most important books could still stay on [[1962]].
We could now try to come up with some hard and fast rule as to when a list in a year's article is too long and deserves its own page, but we could also just leave that up to judgement calls, like anything else really.
Robert mentions another problem: some fans will add entries to years' pages, thus skewing their "importance". That's true, but it is a problem throughout Wikipedia. Many topics are covered from a certain angle, probably because that's the angle the original author liked and/or understood best. The hope is that other authors will show up over time and add other angles. We should expect the same to happen on the years' pages.
Axel
On Sat, 29 Jun 2002 03:07:57 Axel Boldt wrote:
I agree with the point that the Year in Review articles are "space limited" in a sense, but I don't see what's wrong with Toby's solution: let the articles grow until they get too big, then unload the less important stuff to something like [[Books published in 1962]], of course linked to from [[1962]]. The most important books could still stay on [[1962]].
We could now try to come up with some hard and fast rule as to when a list in a year's article is too long and deserves its own page, but we could also just leave that up to judgement calls, like anything else really.
Robert mentions another problem: some fans will add entries to years' pages, thus skewing their "importance". That's true, but it is a problem throughout Wikipedia. Many topics are covered from a certain angle, probably because that's the angle the original author liked and/or understood best. The hope is that other authors will show up over time and add other angles. We should expect the same to happen on the years' pages.
Two issues:
1) How do we decide what stays and what goes when the time comes to weed entries to a more specialised page?
2) I think it's important to be able to weed entries that clearly aren't of much importance even when the page isn't full, so the Year In Review articles remain useful even as they are constructed. However, I'd like guidelines to back up any edits so there's reasons I can point to that say, "No, the release of GigaBlaster XIV for the Nintendo 64 isn't important enough to warrant a mention here. That's why I've moved it to the [[Video Games released in 1997]] page according to the criteria for inclusion on the Year In Review" page.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------ Robert Merkel rgmerk@mira.net
Go You Big Red Fire Engine -- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig ------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel wrote in part:
- I think it's important to be able to weed entries that
clearly aren't of much importance even when the page isn't full, so the Year In Review articles remain useful even as they are constructed. However, I'd like guidelines to back up any edits so there's reasons I can point to that say, "No, the release of GigaBlaster XIV for the Nintendo 64 isn't important enough to warrant a mention here. That's why I've moved it to the [[Video Games released in 1997]] page according to the criteria for inclusion on the Year In Review" page.
As far as what I was thinking of for [[Books_published_in_1962]], a valid excuse for exclusion even from *that* page is "This is not a reasonable subject for an encyclopaedia article.". If you would vote for a page to be deleted on those grounds, then you could remove it from [[1962]], citing the same reasons. And we could make it policy that nothing be added to [[Books_published_in_1962]] until *after* an article has been written; in fact, this page would begin something like:
"This is a list of all [[book]]s published in [[1962]] "that have articles about them on Wikipedia. " "* [[Silent Spring]], by [[Rachel Carson]] "* [[Stranger in a Strange Land]], by [[Robert Heinlein]] etc.
(Hopefully we would *have* an article on Silent Spring by this point, given that we seem to agree that it deserves to be listed on [[1962]] itself.)
I also suspect that, if old hands get into arguments with rabid fans, that rather than "You need to write an article on this book before listing it.", the discussion will be more effective it goes like this: * "This is not a reasonable subject for an encyclopaedia article." * "It is too!!1 Robert Heinlein is the l33test writer ever, d00d." * "OK, then prove it: write an interesting, substantive article on this particular book, and ''then'' list it." After all, if they meet a challenge put like *that*, then it will all be worth it.
-- Toby Bartels toby@math.ucr.edu
On Tue, 02 Jul 2002 15:22:17 Toby Bartels wrote:
Robert Merkel wrote in part:
(Hopefully we would *have* an article on Silent Spring by this point, given that we seem to agree that it deserves to be listed on [[1962]] itself.)
I also suspect that, if old hands get into arguments with rabid fans, that rather than "You need to write an article on this book before listing it.", the discussion will be more effective it goes like this:
- "This is not a reasonable subject for an encyclopaedia article."
- "It is too!!1 Robert Heinlein is the l33test writer ever, d00d."
- "OK, then prove it: write an interesting, substantive article on this particular book, and ''then'' list it."
After all, if they meet a challenge put like *that*, then it will all be worth it.
Agreed, this will be a useful technique for cases like this, but not the complete solution.
After taking the discussion on this issue on board, I'm going to try and write a policy proposal for Year in Review that I'll post on meta sometime this weekend.
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