[WikiEN-l] Notability on the skfields

[Philip Sandifer]

On May 12, 2007, at 9:32 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote:

> Regardless of what you call it, it is perfectly obvious that the
> threshold for including something in an article should be lower than
> the threshold for giving something its own article. The alternative
> would result in Wikipedia being a website containing billions is
> interlinked stubs with nothing else since as soon as anything was
> deemed worthy of getting added to an article it would be split of into
> its own article.

I, at least, have little problem with the same information being  
presented on multiple pages. Nobody, to my knowledge, is presently  
advocating deletion of [[List of New Zealand ski fields]]. But if I  
type "Invincible Snowfields" into my search box, why should I be  
taken to an article on all the New Zealand ski fields? Even if  
there's not much information at [[Invincible Snowfields]], if that's  
the only thing I want information on, what is hurt by giving me that  
information instead of a list of all of the ski fields in New Zealand?

Seeing as most modern web-browsers have a copy-paste function, there  
does not seem to me to be a persuasive reason why information cannot  
be presented in multiple articles. And before somebody attacks this  
claim with the example of redirects, let me point out that redirects  
are sensible when there are multiple titles an article could  
reasonably go by. The issue there is that [[Chairman Mao]] and [[Mao  
Tse Tung]] should be the exact same article. But [[Invincible  
Snowfields]] and [[List of New Zealand ski fields]] do not have that  
same sort of 1:1 correspondence. Nor is it clear that Invincible  
Snowfields is a subtopic of a *list* of ski fields. They are  
reasonably distinct topics. So what is the harm, exactly, in keeping  
them separate? And, specifically, how does this harm relate sensibly  
to the standard of verifiability? (i.e. why is the best way of  
redressing this harm to create a second tier of verifiability for  
article topics)

-Phil