[WikiEN-l] CDcovermeme

[Charlotte Webb]

On 1/27/08, Adrian <aldebaer at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Sorry if this has been through here already. I just found this:
>
> http://www.flickr.com/groups/cdcovermeme/pool/
>
> where I found this (note the "meme rules" in the image description):
>
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/creativejuice/2219924668/in/pool-cdcovermeme

Hilarious. Awesome.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1230_in_Ireland
>
> which led me to the question:
>
> WtF? Talking of memes, are we now going to create stubs for every single
> distinguishable topic, i.e. as long as it isn't some NN/COI case? This
> one has been there since April 2007, which means there is a
> "long-standing consensus" not to delete, right? Because the decade
> 1230-1239, in Ireland, is a plausibly circumscribed article subject, right?

This particular article is about the year 1230, in which at least one
noteworthy event occurred, according to at least one source, which
(hopefully) at least one user can verify. Obviously an argument could
be made for merging the stubbiest of "[year] in [whatever]" articles
to the appropriate "[decade] in [whatever]" article via a
redirect-to-section, e.g.

> #redirect [[1230s in Ireland#1230]]

Obviously any incoming links to such a redirect should remain as-is
rather than being "fixed", as it's harder to identify the ones which
ought to be changed back at a later time, especially in less obscure
cases.

But is it necessary to merge these? Are they really a problem?

There are two basic schema for organizing content:
1. The portion-controlled model. Topics with more content are broken
up into smaller articles and topics with less content are
consolidated, in an effort to minimize deviation from the recommended
article size. At any given moment, paragraphs are being cutnpasted
from one pate to another, half of the incoming links need to be
hand-checked, and attribution[1] is a royal pain in the ass.
2. The uniform-address model. Only when an article on one topic does
become toofuckingbig  does it get broken up into smaller articles. For
the sake of consistency, articles on other topics in the same
fundamental bracket (category) are broken up whether they need it or
not.  A wide variety of navigational boxes will help you find
everything from [[Early life of Drew Barrymore]] to [[1992 in Eugene,
Oregon]] to [[Game 3 (1998 NBA Finals)]] to [[The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock in popular culture]].[2] If only you know what you're
looking for, you'll know exactly where to find it (that is, once you
learn all the silly little patterns, which themselves should could
probably use a shot of consistency).

The exact approach used is always somewhere in between, but nobody is
going to agree on the the perfect balance between consistency of size
and consistency of navigation. Some people will try too hard to make a
dollar out of a fifteen-cent stub and end up with crap, others will
casually shave legitimate content from a long article to avoid
sub-dividing it [3]. Both of these urges should be fervently resisted.

—C.W.

[1] By "attribution" I refer not to any record-keeping required by the
GFDL (which is supposedly satisfied by tracking all edits in the
history tab of some page, somewhere, regardless of where the content
ultimately resides), but to the more practical issue of being able to
determine, years later, "who actually wrote this paragraph" after we
notice that it is (a) excellent, suitable for framing, or (b) deeply
troublesome, potentially libelous, cited to an unreliable and/or
fictitious source, etc.
[2] The latter can and would be a fascinating piece, actually.
[3] Still others will lurk on "new page patrol" will take the freshly
split-off sub-articles straight to AFD because they don't understand
what's going on. After they are deleted, for whatever justification, a
fourth group will revert anyone who attempts to restore the
information to its original place in the parent article as a
"reposting of deleted content". This is how prose gets lost in the
bureaucratic sauce.