[WikiEN-l] Notability and ski resorts (was: Newbie and not-so-newbie biting)

[Carcharoth]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Surreptitiousness wrote:
>> Andrew Gray wrote:
>>
>>> I think we can easily distinguish, though; the
>>> notability-by-association thing really needs most of the set to be
>>> desirable topics for articles (*most* ski runs are interesting, or at
>>> least let us assume they are for this discussion!) and for that set to
>>> be well-defined (you can always tell if a ski run is in Australia or
>>> not).
>>>
>> Yes, this is exactly the sort of gradation we should have and should be
>> able to implement, but is also the sort of gradation that the
>> NOTINHERITED group of editors seek to stamp out. The notability guidance
>> has also become a spanner in the works of Summary Style.  You can't now
>> split an article up if it is too long unless you split it in a way such
>> that each separate article is notable by itself. And even if you manage
>> to do that, there are editors who will accuse you of forking.
>>
> Rightly, in my view. I come down on the (conservative) side of this
> discussion, and agree with the now-ancient decision that article space
> should not admit subpages (which is what subarticles without credible
> free-standing topics amount to).

An example I saw recently that made me think of the discussions over
NOTINHERITED, and notability of daughter articles, and how far summary
style should go, was a recent featured article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson%27s_early_life

It helps that the main article is also featured:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson

And there is plenty of precedent for expanding on long articles
through subarticles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Early_lives_by_individual

25 there and counting:

*Augustus
*Pope Benedict XVI
*George W. Bush
*George Gordon Byron
*Charles Darwin
*Hugo Chávez
*Marcus Aurelius
*Jesus
*John Milton
*Pope John Paul II
*Samuel Johnson
*Abraham Lincoln
*John McCain
*Keith Miller
*Marilyn Monroe
*Isaac Newton
*Barack Obama
*Pope Pius XII
*Plato
*Samuel Coleridge
*Joseph Smith, Jr.
*Jan Smuts
*Stalin
*Rabindranath Tagore
*George Washington

Some you would expect there to be enough material for this sort of
treatment. Others less so. I like the idea of doing this sort of thing
for very long biographcal articles, but seeing how it has developed in
some cases, I'm not so sure. There are some articles I think should
not be treated this way. The material out there is enough for one
article, and that should be enough.

I did look for a category of "middle years" (or "middle life") and
"later years" (or "later life") articles, but those seem less common.
In fact, we seem to only have two "later life" articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later_life_of_Winston_Churchill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_later_life

We seem to have no actual articles on "middle years". Most such
articles are probably specific ones about events and periods in a
person's career and life. e.g. Darwin's Beagle Voyage.

There are templates grouping such life "segments" (or chapters) together:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IsaacNewtonSegments

That's 6 subarticles (actually, one is a link to a section in the main article).

Barack Obama seems to have 14 subarticles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Barack_Obama_sidebar

More examples of biographical navboxes here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_and_person_navbox_templates

It seems a given that for some topics where there is a lot of material
and a lot of writers and a lot of interest, there will be a sprawl
across lots of articles clustering around a central topic. Whether
that is good in the long run, I'm not sure. The focus should be on the
main article, but sometimes building up the surrounding articles
(while the main article remains in a relatively poor state) can help
build towards the main article being re-written as a summary of the
subarticles. The other approach is to write the main article, and then
spin sections off into new article as more material is added. I've
seen both approaches used and both argued against (for different
reasons).

Carcharoth