[WikiEN-l] Notability and ski resorts

[Surreptitiousness]

Carcharoth wrote:
> 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?
But that's the problem.  Articles did used to be seen as part of a 
series or part of a whole back in the day. That's been forgotten since 
the notability meme took hold, and now every article is allegedly a 
topic in its own right.
 I don't really know what you do with early life articles.  I'm still 
working out how you define early life.  Is it done by percentage, so 
that it scales no matter how long the subject lived? ;) And here's one 
for you: Say you have a featured article, and you split a section off to 
a new article.  Is that article also a featured article?  I feel we may 
be tying ourselves in knots a little too much here.  I don't understand 
exactly what the issue is with "Early life of..." I should think there 
are plenty of books that have a chapter entitled "Early life of", after 
all.  I think this is simply another outbreak of how broad and how deep. 
Taking a glance at FA conditions, we're still required to be 
comprehensive. We don't have Wikipedia:Comprehensive but we do have 
Wikipedia:Detail, which bids us to write "until a topic is /very/ 
thoroughly covered." However, this ties back to subtopics and daughter 
articles, which leads us back to the discussion about whether 
sub-articles are allowed.  We don't do /subarticle, but we do apparently 
do a subpage, according to guidance. Is there no possible way we can get 
all our guidance on the same page.  It might make dealing with conflicts 
that little bit easier.  We could start with Ignore all rules, and then 
work forwards from there.  Maybe we could merge all the policy nutshells 
to one policy page, merge all the guideline nutshells to another, and 
tag all the full pages as supplements.