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

[David Goodman]

> 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".

I meant that it would be *possible* for us to do this without
violating WP:OR, not that we *ought* to. Given the detail of academic
sourcing in some subject, many Wikipedia articles could be ten times
their size.  This is not always desirable.



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



On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Carcharoth
<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>