Bryan Derksen wrote:
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.
"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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That depends if the second topic is a valid one in the first place. Deletion, cutting, and merging are excellent ways to deal with articles which aren't covered significantly in secondary, independent sources. Editors edit. Part of that is to cut. That's not a bad thing.