[WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty

[Carcharoth]

Can you remember which French encyclopedias did that elaborate scheme.
It sounds interesting.

The difference with Wikipedia is the possibilities of linkage and
transclusions and differing formats available in a digital
encyclopedia, but the downside is the inconsistency in the solutions
devised and discarded and reinvented over the years in an encyclopedia
anyone can edit - it is sometimes difficult for consistency to emerge.

I agree that something driven by reader choice would be good, but
still with editorial guidance.

Carcharoth

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 4:39 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> We will never solve the problem of structuring--different
> encyclopedias at various times have done it quite opposite. (Some
> French encyclopedias have even consisted of 5 or 6 very long volume
> length articles, divided in an elaborate scheme to a number of
> subsections. Recall that the print Brittanica for many years was
> divided into two separate parts, one with long articles, one with
> short ones--and with many subjects having  a different article in each
> section.
>
> In an electronic encyclopedia using structured information, and
> sufficiently elaborate metadata  and frameworks, to provide the
> different frameworks, the reader would be able to  convert back and
> forth between separated and combined formats, just like an electronic
> map can display one or more layers .
>
> The problem is not structure. The problem is that people take having a
> separate article as an indicator of importance, and will continue to
> do so. Readers have expectations, and we write for them, not
> ourselves, so we need to conform to what they expect of an
> encyclopedia format.
>
> But another problem is content: in an open edited encyclopedia with no
> enforceable editorial guidelines, experience shows that the content of
> individual items in long articles will tend to shorten, and combining
> into large articles loses information. When there are short articles,
> people tend to want to make them longer, and they look for and add
> information--information sometimes in unencyclopedic detail.
>
> We are spending far too much time debating over structure of
> individual articles--it would be much better to have fixed conventions
> for different types of articles, and everyone write to them.
> Deliberately taking a field I do not work in, we could for example
> decide that all the athletic teams of a college will be grouped in one
> article separate from the college, regardless of importance and
> regardless of how how long or short the resulting article is.  Or we
> could decide that for some sports, such as football, we would always
> make a separate article if there were a varsity team. Either way,
> people would know where to write the material. (I am not advocating
> for doing either one of them, except to say that either one would be
> simpler to deal with than a mixture, and after their first experience
> with the encyclopedia, people would know where to look.
>
>
> according to reader choice.
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 9:04 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Charles Matthews
>> <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>> Some of the more high-profile associated topics of
>>> notable topic X can be mentioned in the article on X, but that doesn't
>>> mean they are all worth a separate article. Such decisions should go
>>> case-by-case, but in general terms they are about structuring of
>>> content, rather than permissible content.
>>
>> Structuring of content is an interesting question. Sometimes small
>> stubs are better than a list, as it is easier to link to separate
>> articles than to items in a list, especially if there is no real
>> unifying structure for the list. Sometimes it takes a while to work
>> out what list, or summary article, something should be part of, but if
>> done well, that can work well.
>>
>> But sometimes separate articles is the way to go. Even if the
>> individual articles are unlikely to be much more than a GA-level
>> article at best, the separate articles approach has several
>> advantages, even if some content gets duplicated across several
>> articles.
>>
>> Carcharoth
>>
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