[WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 11:39 AM 3/6/2010, David Goodman wrote:
>We will never solve the problem of structuring--different
>encyclopedias at various times have done it quite opposite.

That's a non sequitur. The solved the problem. Differently.

>  (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.

I have that encyclopedia, it was brilliant. The next step was 
hypertext. Wikipedia didn't adopt a layered hypetext model, but a 
flat model, which then does not allow a notability hierarchy, only an 
all-or-nothing decision, more or less. Either a separate article or 
inclusion as a section in an article (or item in a list) or no 
inclusion at all.

Part of this was a decision not to allow subpages. Using a subpage 
structure would allow a top-level page on a topic that would require 
high notability and stable and broad consensus, with the notability 
level being enough to justify the attention that it takes to gain 
high consensus when there is controversy, in particular. Then the 
top-level page would refer to subpages on details and related topic 
as best classified. If we began to understand notability as not 
absolute, but relative, and use such a page structure, notability 
decisions would be *classifications,* not absolute, as such. If it's 
determined that there is a certain minimum standard for an article to 
exist at all, (basically, WP:V), then the argument becomes, not 
Keep/Delete for anything that can satisfy the policy, but what level 
of notability and classification is best *for the reader*.

The present Wikipedia structure, to this reader, is a mess. Sometimes 
I go to an article and it's just right, but more often there is 
either too little detail or too much. Various revert wars, in topics 
where there is either controversy or some faction or other wants the 
project to be A Certain WAy, have removed much of what used to be of 
high utility in topics I know. I read Robert Cleese the other way. I 
love Mr. Cleese. And the article made me want to throw up. It's not 
something specific, it is the indiscriminate mixture of truly notable 
information wtih boring *verifiable* detail, assuming it's verifiable.

With a subpage structure, there would be a top level article on Mr. 
Cleese. (Actually, it might not be fully top, there might be a 
Comedians article above it, or something like that, or maybe 
Biographies/Comedians.... etc. The Comedians page might be a general 
history of Comedians, types of comedians, etc, based on sources, etc. 
On the Cleese page would be an overview of his life and the most 
notable aspects of it, like you'd find in an ordinary biographical 
encyclopedia. And then there would be, as appropriate, subpages to 
cover the "boring detail," which may, in fact, be of interest to someone.

>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 .

Yeah, and subpages actually make this easy with any browser. I'm not 
sure that "combined formats" are needed, but that's a software issue. 
Collapse boxes are another approach that can be used instead of 
subpages. And, suppose that this or some idea is a good one. How in 
the world would a decision be made? I see that the simplest decisions 
can take such horrifically complicated process that people have 
mostly given up.

>The problem is not structure.

DGG has not understood my references to structure. It's about 
decision-making process, which others have called "governance." But 
how the project is presented is a *kind* of structure, a different 
kind than what I'm talking about, and there is an inter-relation.

>  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.

The expectation was inappropriate, setting that up was an error, that 
predictably created high inefficiency, as the boundary is constantly 
debated. We have piles of articles that do not match reader's 
expectations of "importance," and missing articles that do, largely 
because readers vary and have different needs and expectations. "The 
sum of human knowledge" creates expectations that are seriously at 
variance with actual practice.

>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.

Right. Give them a place to put "unencyclopedic detail." Don't 
prohibit it, harness it. There are good reasons for sticking to WP:V, 
and allowing linking to external sites that present speculation, 
controversy, etc., etc., in some cases from the lowest permitted 
layer on Wikipedia. Basically, Wikipedia should be the "sum" as in 
"summary," i.e., precis, but for it to be neutral, it must be quite 
complete, and it can resolve the contributions by linking to what it 
cannot contain. To a student researching a topic, this would return 
Wikipedia articles to what they used to often be -- in controversial 
topics: links to the primary sources or "sides" of a controversy. 
Often this would not be appropriate for an "encyclopedia article," in 
itself. The top layer. But "summary" should include links to Further 
Reading, particularly to a set of such links that would allow a 
relatively complete understanding of the topic, in whatever detail is 
desired by the reader. The project should facilitate the acquisition 
of knowledge, as fully as possible, but much of this would be 
indirect, by pointing to outside sources where the information 
doesn't meet WP:V with sufficient strength.

>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.

Bingo. And if people don't like the convention, there would be a 
place to debate that. If there is a disconnet with a higher-level 
decision and a lower-level one (I.e., at an article), then this 
should be *resolved*. With whatever level of involvement of the 
community as is necessary to actually resolve it instead of simply 
deciding that one side is right and the other side is wrong and if 
the other side keeps arguing, ban 'em. Without ever going through the 
process of finding consensus, which isn't necessarily easy. But it's 
necessary, or the project gradually becomes warped away from neutrality.

>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.

That's right. Make class decisions, document them. Then if there are 
exceptions, *document them.* Allow "instruction creep!" But without 
turning the "instructions" into fixed rules, rather they should be 
documentation of consensus, and consensus can change. And make the 
change possible. And how to do that *efficiently* is my major focus 
and concern, and has been for almost thirty years.

>Or we
>could decide that for some sports, such as football, we would always
>make a separate article if there were a varsity team.

The separate article would have a section in the overall one, 
covering the football team in summary style. Standard.

>  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.

Sure. The guideline pages would themselves be hypertext; that can be 
done in WP space. The only space where subpages don't work is 
mainspace, which results in some weird stuff. For example, Talk:OS/2 
thinks that it's a subpage of Talk:OS. It would have been better to 
allow subpages in mainspace, for defined use, and use a special 
character or escape character for a page name with a slash in it. 
There is a MediaWiki option to allow subpages in mainspace, but I 
don't know that there is a fix for the slash problem.

>according to reader choice.

Readers? Since when do they have a say? If you are a SPA (which 
usually means some kind of expert on the topic, even if "only" 
amateur), you are definitely second class. Being only a reader, who 
will listen to you?

There would be a way to actually empower readers, but don't hold your 
breath for the "community" to approve of it. The "community" means 
the community of registered editors, and especially of 
administrators, in practice, and, being invested in their own 
contributions and positions on content, this community doesn't 
necessarily have the same goals or values as readers. (In some cases, 
the active editors understand the issues better than the ordinary 
readers, but that's not always so reliable that it produces better 
content, in terms of fundamental policy, it depends!)