[WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

[Zoney]

On 26/09/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I am not wedded to the idea of needing a separate article for each and
> every
> school in the US.  I do think that the info should be included here,
> somewhere.  A realistic policy that balances including the info and using
> fairly normal article size management process would be fine.  But it would
> be terrible to do it in a messy hodgepodge manner; we should identify a
> pattern and establish a guideline, if that's going to happen.
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herbert at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
>

Well - I would argue that this is not specific to school articles - and that
there is a fundemental problem with organisation of information on
Wikipedia. Information naturally is hierarchical - if we are really an
encyclopaedia, broad topics need articles that refer to sub-topics, that
break down to the minuitia.

Sure this sort of happens - but like you say - it's in a messy hodgepodge
manner.

Even if there are "guidelines", Wikipedia's organisation mechanism will
ensure that there is - generally speaking, no consistent standard of
applying those guidelines. Nevermind the fact that the concept of having no
hard and fast rules is not really sustainable.

I make little apology for being so critical of Wikipedia's processes - I
only do so because I've been here for quite some time, put a lot into the
project, and would really like to see it improve a lot. At present it's like
driving down the national roads (main arterial routes) in Ireland - where
along the same route you will have anything between spanking new motorway
and aged narrow two lane (no hard shoulders) winding bumpy country road (on
a major intercity route). Oh - except that in Wikipedia's case - bits of the
road are missing entirely.

Zoney

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