[WikiEN-l] Why article creation/deletion is different from text creation/deletion

[dpbsmith at verizon.net]

Encylopedia articles have structures. And encyclopedias taken as a whole have 
structures.  They are not simply loose conglomerations. (The means Wikipedia 
uses to produce an encyclopedia means that in progress it tends to look more 
like loose conglomeration than other encyclopedias, but that is not the 
goal).

I doubt that many people actually use the Britannica "Propaedia" but the 
quality of the Britannica is probably due in part to its existence.

Conversely, the value of the "yearbooks" that encyclopedia publishers hawk to 
"keep your encyclopedia up to date" is low because even though the individual 
articles in it may match those of the rest of the encyclopedia in quality, 
the "yearbooks" do not fit into the structure of the main encyclopedia. This 
is not simply a matter of indexing them; successive editions of encyclopedias 
are _not_ produced by incorporating the yearbook articles into them in 
alphabetical order.

The effect of editing within an article affects the structure of a single 
argle. The effect of creating or deleting an article affects the structure of 
the encyclopedia as a whole and is therefore a more significant event than 
edits within an article.