[WikiEN-l] Re: The proliferation of article series boxes, and other sundries

[Timwi]

Christopher Mahan wrote:

> I also would like people to consider that once an article is printed
> on a piece of paper, the box-lists and categories become completely
> useless.

I also would like to remind people that Wikipedia is not paper. Please 
stop comparing it to that. Nobody cares (or should care) about that just 
yet because we are not yet actively working on a paper encyclopedia. If 
and when we are, this is a concern of the people who work on that, and 
nobody else's. And even for them, the {{msg:}} things are extremely 
trivial to remove.

On the web, they do not do any harm... of course, as long as it's not 
overdone. I quite agree with some of the sentiments brought up that an 
article on a Belgian mathematician would look rather silly if it had a 
list of all mathematicians as well as another list of all famous 
Belgians in it. But who's doing that, anyway? Nobody is seriously 
considering creating such boxes because by all measurements of common 
sense they would be way too large and there would be way too many of 
them. By contrast, the boxes on things like [[Greater Cleveland]] are 
perfectly fine.

Timwi