[WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 09:04 AM 3/6/2010, Carcharoth wrote:
>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.

As a process junkie, my concern is how the decision gets made. When 
there is an article covering the *class* of articles, and national 
society members of a notable international society provides such an 
example, then a list can be used either within that article or 
separately. Then the question arises as whether available sourced 
detail about each society should go in the list or in stubs (with 
stubs becoming more extensive articles where justified by the 
existence of sources.) That's a decision on which no general 
guideline could be set, I believe, at least not at this point. One of 
the ways of creating "guidelines" is to link to examples of 
decisions, which can then point out inconsistencies, and sometimes 
these inconsistencies represent truly different cases (i.e., they 
aren't really inconsistent, because the conditions are different) or 
represent a need for attention to one or the other examples. Creating 
better guidelines like this could actually result in cleaner content.

But not by making guidelines controlling, simply by making them 
reflect actual practice, which might, transiently, actually cite 
contradictory practices.

When actual practice conflicts with a guideline, if the actual 
practice is cited in the guideline as an exception, it then can 
attract wider review. Is this good? I think so! Maybe the actual 
practice is what's defective and what will fix it is changing the 
actual decisions, not demanding that the guideline reflect the ideal.

>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.

Yes. The radio amateur stubs all say more or less the same thing in 
the lede, boilerplate. But that's short. They have the logo of the 
society in a template. The articles are mostly brief and attractive. 
There are two lists, the list of national members of the IARU, in the 
IARU article, and a List of amateur radio organizations. The latter 
is a far more problematic case, and attention will turn to it and the 
articles listed there. The "deletionist" -- no aspersions intended -- 
focused on the national organizations, where the strongest case can 
be made. If this editor had succeeded there, there then would have 
been a pile of AfDs very likely to be successful. I have not 
expressed an opinion on the pile of local clubs shown in the overall 
list, but I'm guessing that consensus there will be to merge most of 
the individual articles back to the list, once the national 
organization issue is out of the way, which it largely is. There will 
be, I expect, if I'm not banned in short order, a DRV on the single 
deleted national organization, and I expect it's likely to be 
successful at undeletion. Or not. *Wikipedia process is unreliable.* 
Sure, ultimately a consensus can be found, but it can be horrific 
getting there.