[Wikipedia-l] Subsections

[Larry Sanger]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Larry Sanger wrote:
> > I'd like to see one example of an article, or a class of articles, that
> > would be clearly improved by being put in article-with-subsections form,
> > rather than simply broken into a series of shorter articles.
>
> It might not be that the _articles_ are improved, but the _search
> engine_ and _navigation in general_.  Maybe.  :-)

One thing that makes navigation easy right now is that the organization of
articles is simple, after all.

> The example I have in mind: Iwo Jima.  It's a place.  Most people who
> search for Iwo Jima are not looking for general information about the
> place, though. Mostly people are interested in Iwo Jima because of the
> important WWII battle fought there.
>
> A search for Iwo Jima could look like either of these:
>
> WITHOUT SUBSECTIONS
> [[Iwo Jima]]
> [[Iwo Jima In World War II]]
> [[Major Battles of the Pacific Theater in WWII]]
>
> WITH SUBSECTIONS
> [[Iwo Jima]]
> [[World War II]] -- subsection on "Iwo Jima as a turning point"
> [[Major Battles of the Pacific Theater in WWII]] -- subsection on "Iwo Jima"

I see that advantage, yes.

> The second and third examples are different.  In one case, I am
> imaginging that the article would actually be written differently.
> Instead of having a short [[World War II]] article and lots of
> independent articles, we have a longer article with subsections.
> There are pros and cons to this.

There sure are a lot of cons.  This is pretty much a different approach to
the old subpages idea, and the same objections apply (e.g., why not have
subsubsections?--that's only one of them).

> But in the third case, I'm imagining that the article is written the
> exact same way in both cases -- but we now have a means to call
> special attention to the fact that the article does contain a
> subsection on Iwo Jima, rather than merely _mentioning_ Iwo Jima.
> This seems a net improvement.

Actually, I think the way we've been proceeding in many (not all) cases
has been the correct way: the general articles have general information
(not just links to more specialized articles), omitting many details.  The
general articles link to more specialized articles.

I've got an article on metaphysics, for example, that links several other
many more specialized topics in metaphysics.  But if someone wants to know
what metaphysics is, and what sorts of concepts and problems are
"metaphysical," hopefully he could go to the metaphysics article and find
out.  What would be really a bad thing is if he had to go to a series of
more specialized articles to learn about metaphysics--which would be the
case if "metaphysics" were nothing more than a bunch of links to
specialized topics within metaphysics.

Generally, with subsections, the tendency, I imagine, would be to write
more very long articles, rather than break down such long articles into
series of shorter articles on specific subjects, and make the
formerly-long article into a moderate-sized article that discusses the
topic *at a length-appropriate level of generality* and serves as a
pointer to more specialized articles.

It is really, really important that we think in detail about how
contemplated features like this would actually be used over the long haul,
and whether in a long-term context they make any sense.  Subsections, like
subpages, make very little sense to me, and for similar reasons.

> One of the mistakes of Nupedia was that we tried to design the perfect
> system a priori, including grandiose visions of XML-marked-up text to
> permit all kinds of fancy searching.  :-(
>
> At Wikipedia, we take things simpler.  But if something is harmless
> (and ONLY if it is harmless), we might add it.

Hear, hear.

Larry