[WikiEN-l] Is Merging Worse than Deletion?

[John Lee]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> A few iterations of the inclusionism/deletionism debate back, we seem
>  to have settled on merging articles as a sort of happy medium.
>  Increasingly, though, it seems to me that mergism and redirectionism
>  is proving more destructive to our content and its growth than
>  deletion was.
>
>  I'll limit myself to fiction articles, since that's where I've seen
>  the worst effects, though I'd love to hear from people who edit in
>  other areas. [[List of characters in Gilmore Girls]] was the target of
>  a wealth of merges of characters, such that no characters in the show
>  have individual articles anymore. And, indeed, the old character
>  articles were crappy in-universe messes of the sort we want to clean up.
>
>  The problem is that it is easy for any of the major series regular
>  characters to have an article written about them. Gilmore Girls was a
>  critical darling of a show, actors regularly gave interviews, all
>  seasons are on DVD with a decent number of special features that
>  provide out-of-universe information. The information is clearly and
>  transparently there. The articles could have eventually been improved.
>
>  But the articles did not satisfy notability in their old forms, and so
>  are now gone. And, worse than gone, they're redirects - which means
>  that a newbie user is going to have a much harder time figuring out
>  how to go about fixing them. Redlinks at least cry out to be fixed.
>  Redirects avoid being fixed. And since the characters now exist in a
>  list, incremental improvement is a real challenge. The format of the
>  articles doesn't lend itself to expansion into new areas, as it seems
>  weird to have only one entry on a list have out-of-universe
>  information. Furthermore, the nature of a list os succinctness -
>  expanding an entry with a lot of information is unwanted.
>
>  Deletion at least left a visible hole in our coverage that anybody
>  could see and fix. Redirects, through a combination of unclear
>  interface ("How do I fix/make a redirect" is just about the most
>  common question asked by my non-wiki using friends when they try to
>  edit) and an institutional resistance to un-merging that is almost as
>  bad as abusive G4 speedies, redirectionism seems to me to destroy our
>  coverage of areas more severely than deletion.
>
>  The real culprit here is WP:N, which does not do nearly enough to
>  protect articles on topics that obviously could pass its standard of
>  notability, but do not yet. The anti-eventualist bias of this
>  requiring of multiple independent sources to be cited before an
>  article can avoid deletion is appalling. We need to remember that
>  articles grow slowly, and that a mediocre start is still a better
>  foundation for an article than a redirect.

Indeed, Phil. I've become more certain over the years that generally,
the question of whether there should be an article, a redirect, or no
article for a particular topic should be dependent alone on the nature
of the topic, and not the nature of the article we happen to have
about it at the time. If George W. Bush is notable, there can be
little excuse for deleting or redirecting his article to [[Presidents
of the United States]] just because, say, the first revision ever was
"he eatz poop" or even something more coherent blaming him for every
evil on the planet. Likewise for TV shows, and so forth.

What concerns me is that we often have a lower standard for mergers
and redirections than we do for deletion. That only makes sense, but
it does sometimes lead to strange situations. I still remember someone
once proposed merging and redirecting our articles on the lower and
upper houses of the Malaysian Parliament to [[Parliament of Malaysia]]
because there was supposedly insufficient content in those two
articles to merit keeping them separate. Even if we took the latter to
be true, it is disturbing that there is rarely any consideration of
whether the article topic is in itself notable.

A good first step nevertheless would be to make undoing redirections
easier. At the moment only experienced users can handle this. I am not
sure about how we can best modify the user interface to make fixing
redirects more transparent, while not annoying casual readers, but we
should start thinking about this problem now; it's way overdue to be
fixed, come to think of it.

Johnleemk