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

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 4:22 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.).

Thanks for the background. I suspected there were massive works out there.

> 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.

Summary articles? Don't you mean summary sections? No article should
be just a collection of summaries, though the lead section should be a
summary of the whole article, and some sections can be summaries of
larger articles. But having the entire article be a collection of
summaries is bad (for starters, when you edit one of the subarticles,
there is no warning that you are also affecting content on another
page, and thus might be contradicting what is said elsewhere on that
page).

I recently came across an attempt to set up pathology as an article
composed entirely of sections consisting of lead sections of the
subarticles. It wasn't very successful.

The page can still be seen here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pathology&oldid=301684595

Click "edit" on that old page version to see what I mean about how
this was set up (but don't click save!).

Because transclusions like that are dynamic, that sort of thing
severely messes up the page history - you can't see what the article
looked like at any one time, because the editing took place in the
subarticles, not on the main article, and even if you look back at
that page version "12 July 2009", what you are seeing there is
transclusions of what the lead sections of the subarticles say *now*.

> But we never should be writing a book-length biography,

Agreed.

> although we could in many cases find the necessary material, based
> entirely on secondary & tertiary sources.

So should that more detailed material be used or not? And if so, in what way?

> 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".

But doesn't this contradict what you said earlier?

"we never should be writing a book-length biography"

Or do you mean that a series of articles that *together* would be the
equivalent of a book-length biography, is OK, but a *single* article
that is the length of a book, is not OK? Or am I misunderstanding what
you are saying here? Maybe you mean a middle ground, where we have
more than one article, each on a different period in a person's life,
but we shouldn't have so many, in such detail, that the collection as
a whole approaches book length?

If you mean the latter, then the collection of Obama articles we have
are approaching the length of a book. Is that good or not?

Collection:

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

Main article:

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

Subarticles (chronological):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_and_career_of_Barack_Obama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_Senate_career_of_Barack_Obama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_career_of_Barack_Obama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_presidential_primary_campaign,_2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_presidential_campaign,_2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_transition_of_Barack_Obama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_of_Barack_Obama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Barack_Obama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_100_days_of_Barack_Obama%27s_presidency

We also have two appendix/list-type articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_Barack_Obama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Presidency_of_Barack_Obama

And general topic articles, that take a different approach to looking
at Obama's life:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Barack_Obama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_Barack_Obama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_of_Barack_Obama

Overall, that collection is approaching the size of a decent booklet on Obama.

It is also interesting to compare the amount of coverage of Obama in
terms of standalone articles, compared to other presidents and
presidencies.

The article we have on the Presidential transition of Barack Obama is
the only article we have on any presidential transition (the others
are sections in the articles on the presidencies or the presidents, if
that). This can be confirmed by this search (using the 'intitle'
search parameter):

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=0&search=intitle%3Apresidential%2Btransition&fulltext=Search&ns0=1

Is the fact that this is the only presidential transition to get its
own article because this is the most intensely documented presidential
transition in history? Or is it because Wikipedia's segmented coverage
of Barack Obama's life has gone too far? Or is it because the other
articles on presidential transitions have yet to be written?

Take Presidential inaugurations. We have a lot more of those:

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

Note that many subarticles are subarticles of more than one article.
The ones on Barack Obama's presidential transition and inauguration
would be both subarticles of Barack Obama, and also subarticles of the
articles on the history of US presidential transitions and US
presidential inaugurations. And in theory, those would in turn be
subarticles on the history of the US presidency, and so on and so on.
Though drawing the line around a topic has to be done at some point.

The question seems to be, should articles and subarticles sprout far
and wide as long as there are sufficient sources to support them? Or
should growth from a central article be more planned and steady than
that?

Carcharoth