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

[David Goodman]

A modern book length biography of Johnson would certainly have
chapters for different stages in his life (though Boswell wrote his in
chronological order by year, but otherwise in a single continuous
sequence (with the result that in the usual modern edition, the 4 vol.
work needs a 2 vol. index.).

An article on it, print or encyclopedia, would have subheadings. The
virtue of summary style is not just subdivision, but that our readers
have multiple goals in mind, and the summary articles act as  brief
accounts. But we   never should be writing a book-length biography,
although we could in many cases find the necessary material, based
entirely on secondary & tertiary sources. We could do even more: there
are book-length works based on specific  periods in his life
(Kaminski's "Early career of Samuel Johnson";  Clifford's "Dictionary
Johnson : Samuel Johnson's middle years".

 .
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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