On Thursday 29 August 2002 03:56 pm, you wrote:

is it just me or has anyone else noticed the sheer amount of lists that we have? running a title search for the word 'list' will come up with such bizarre pages as [[List of places and things named Oxford]].

I know list can be usefull but isn't this going a bit too far? (especially that we've got a decent search function now). Shouldn't the lists be simply attached to the main article without creating a new page for each and every on of them?

regards, [[list of people and things named WojPob]]

Long lists are not appropriate for encyclopedia articles (why force somebody on dial-up to download a 20 KB list just to read a 1 KB article?). Wikipedia is not paper and many almanac-like lists do add peripheral content to particular subjects. When a list in an encyclopedia article gets distractingly long it is then necessary to create a "list of" subarticle.

These lists are almost always only linked from their parent article so I don't see what the fuss is about. On http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Statistics I've already proposed that almanac-like entries (such as lists) be included in a separate total article count (I once didn't even consider lists to be articles but have since accepted the fact that this type of almanac-like info has always and will always be with wikipedia).

If you don't like lists, then don't contribute to their creation or better yet make them more useful by adding some content to naked lists (that is; birth and death dates by names, major attributes, etc.). Different people contribute in different ways and it is interesting to sometimes see a list of biologists after reading the article on biologists -- the search function yields messy results for this type of thing.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS [[List of places and things named Oxford]] is a disambiguation page that is only linked from a disambiguation block in [[Oxford]]. I just gave it a better name; [[Oxford (disambiguation)]] (disambiguation pages is another thing I have proposed to treat differently in the total article count).