G'day Todd,
********** If everything can fit comfortably in a list, why have individual articles? **********
Why not? Who says an article that's three, two, even one paragraph --- if it's a good paragraph --- long is a Bad Thing? Why merge for the heck of it if it makes it more difficult for our readers?
Some things should be merged. Some things should not be merged. Things do not automatically enter the first category just because they're short enough.
********** And if only some are too long to fit in the list, why not have some individual articles and some anchored redirects? **********
I don't know how often you read Wikipedia. I use it a lot, whether for research or simply because I was reading something and got sidetracked following links (this happens a lot). It is *extremely* annoying to following a link from an article (or click a bunch of links to open them in new tabs) only to be redirected right back to where you started from. Now, this is better than nothing if we don't have an article there (so a reader going to that redirect blind will at least see the context of what they were looking for) but replacing an article with a redirect to a list, where the user was hoping to read more about the subject instead, is just Deletionism Gone Mad.
Now, I'm bang alongside deletionism most of the time. Often it seems to me that people want to write about stuff that no-one wants to read, either for self-promotion or kookery or because they're anoraks ("An interesting feature of this train platform is the small crack that appears in the concrete, roughly two metres to the north of the information booth. There is another small crack thirty centimetres away from this one, to the south. Another interesting feature is ..."). But if someone wants to read about a ski resort --- obviously I'm hoping that more information in that article will soon appear --- why not let them? Why force a redirect because Todd Allen doesn't consider the subject notable enough? Deliberately removing information for the heck of it doesn't strike me as good policy.
-- [[User:MarkGallagher]]