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

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
> 2009/9/22 Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>:
>
>> 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 think a good analogy here is explicit general history articles. We
> view it as quite normal to go from
>
> [[History of something]]
>
> and then, when it gets too large, split it out into
>
> [[History of something]]
> * [[History of something in the Bronze Age]]
> * [[History of something in the Middle Ages]]
> * [[History of something in World War I]]
>
> etc.

Indeed. And I agree with this for broad history articles, but less so
for narrower topics, such as the biography of an individual. The
question is where to stop.

There are some topics where thousands of articles could be written, to
reflect the amount of secondary literature out there (especially on
those broad history topics). But for biographical articles, are there
books that cover XYZ's early life? If not, and if most biographies
only have a chapter on it, should we really have a feature-length
article on it? Should they not be considered part of a series, part of
a whole?

Carcharoth