Timwi wrote:
David Friedland wrote:
I think series boxes are fine for articles that are in a _series_, but for groups of related articles, I think categories are the best solution.
How do you define the difference between "article series" and "groups of related articles"?
It's somewhat nebulous, I'll agree, but to me, an article series would be articles that (under at least one interpretation) are related to each other linearly, that is, each article in a series has a clear previous and next article. Articles series about history are an obvious example of this, but there are probably other ways that articles can be related linearly other than chronologically. An example that comes to mind (because I worked on them) are the articles about consonant sounds. The various places of articulation form a linear series of articles, from bilabial to glottal.
I would say that most of the current article "series" aren't really series as such but are just groups of related articles, and so technically the box containing links to the related articles aren't really so much "series" boxes as much as they are "related articles" boxes.
Another way to consider the so-called "series boxes" might to think of them as a sort of "tour" of a group of related articles. I could see perhaps formalizing this idea and creating "tours" of different topics. Of course the arguments about what is included in the tour and in what order I can envision becoming extraordinarily pedantic, but such is the way of Wikipedia.
I'll stop before my ramble gets too long.
-- David