[WikiEN-l] Parallel Articles on topics

[Andrew Gray]

On 27 June 2010 18:10, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well said. Forks should exist to deal with articles that would be too
> long otherwise and for no other reason. You should be able to combine
> all the forks together (replacing the summary in the main article with
> the full article) and end up with a (very long) coherent article.

And here's a secondary problem :-)

I think it's key we don't call these forks - they're not.

Forks are articles on fundamentally the same thing, but written
differently - they may be forked for philosophical reasons, for
administrative reasons, or even for stylistic ones,* but they're still
two articles on Topic X which disagree on something.

They're bad.

The alternative is "daughter articles" - at least, that's the term
I've always encountered, and I'm curious if we call them anything else
- which exist to go into more detail than the main article, or to
bring out aspects that wouldn't be appropriate there, or to pull
material together from a number of disparate articles to avoid
duplication (for example, three people involved in a single notable
event whose lives otherwise don't cross).

These are fine.

We might say, rather than both being on Topic X, that they're on Topic
X.i, X.ii, X.iii, etc.  They *can* be written badly, and effectively
amount to forks, but that's a specific content issue; we should avoid
thinking of them as a kind of fork by default.

The problem arises when the scope of a sub-article is such that it's
almost forkish by nature - [[A's views on Topic X]], [[B's views on
Topic X]], etc. It's a bit hazier here - but as long as we keep the
emphasis on writing about the views, rather than presenting them as
statements of sourced fact, we're probably on the right side of the
line.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

* I can't remember if I laughed or cried when I saw that one.