[WikiEN-l] What en:wp would look like printed out

[Bryan Derksen]

Adrian wrote:
> Stan, in theory, you're right. In practice, I see a tendency to the 
> opposite. Take a look at the SA link, in case you don't know it yet. 
> It's an old story, but the examples of article pairs, although many of 
> them are chosen tongue-in-cheek, speak for themselves.
> 
> http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/wikigroaning.php

"Wikigroaning" is somewhat amusing, but as a serious criticism it's
hopelessly fallacious. You can't just compare the byte count of the
article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number and the byte count
of the article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Prime and expect
to get a meaningful comparison of Wikipedia's coverage of those topics.
When a Wikipedia article reaches a certain size or level of detail
sections get split out into other articles that are focused on narrower
sub-topics; a more meaningful comparison is the content of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Prime_numbers>. If all of
Wikipedia's coverage of prime numbers were merged into one article it
would be monsterously huge and unwieldy.

In any event, when one finds a situation where one topic has lots of
coverage and another topic has less but one feels should have more, I
don't believe the appropriate solution is to delete stuff from the first
topic until they're even. The solution should be to _add_ stuff to the
second topic.

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