[Wikipedia-l] Subsections

[Larry Sanger]

I just formulated an interesting hypothesis, which might explain why some
people are attracted to ideas like subpages and subsections, despite the
many clear disadvantages of them.  Sorry, this is going to be a bit of a
ramble.

There is an inherent discomfort we all experience when we see that
information is not properly contextualized.  We don't like to start in the
middle of things.  General expository works, such as technical books, very
often start with very general chapters that present level at a level of
generality and simplicity that implies that the rest of the book is going
to be a lot simpler than it is; it turns out that, for anyone who can
understand the rest of the book, the introduction was old hat and pretty
much unnecessary.

In the context of Wikipedia, we'd hate (in varying degrees) to come across
an article on the Battle of Iwo Jima that goes into detail about troop
movements, generals, casualties, and so forth, and yet doesn't put the
thing into the context of the Pacific Theater, which has to be put into a
larger context to be properly understood, and so forth.  But the
contextualizing has to stop somewhere.  At some point, we have to let the
other articles do the work.

Not quite realizing this, some people come up with this dandy idea of
hardwiring the connection between certain subtopics and certain parent
topics.  This way, nobody can mistake that Mr. Burns is a character in The
Simpsons, that Frodo Baggins lives in Middle Earth, and so forth--totally
essential, of course, to understanding who Mr. Burns and Frodo are
supposed to be.  But there are other essential relationships between
topics that are equally deserving of being hardwired.

This tendency to want to supply context is *totally* well-meaning and
well-intentioned.  The problem is that it doesn't neatly solve the problem
it is mainly intended to solve, because it reflects a poor understanding
of the problem.

The problem subpaging and subsectioning proposals are trying to solve is
simply that everything requires context in order to be properly
understood.  That IS a problem; but subpages and subsections just will not
solve that problem by themselves; they have a host of problems themselves,
besides.

In hypertext encyclopedia, the contextualization problem is *naturally*
and *elegantly* solved with two tools: hyperlinks, and equally
importantly, text that is written at a proper level of generality, that
*provides* the really *essential* background for a specific topic on the
spot.  One simply has to distinguish the essential from the nonessential.

An article titled "World War II" simply cannot and should not aspire to be
any more than the most superficial introduction to a conflict that
requires many volumes just for bare exposition and slenderest theorizing.
It should act as a contextualizer of the next level down of subtopics,
which might repeat some of the information in "World War II," but which
give more detail.  And so on, and so on.

Another example is generally given by a number of different articles I've
adapted from my introductory philosophy lectures.  I *could* have pumped
for subsections in order to create, say, eight parts to one long article
about ethics.  Instead, I used the introductory material, from the front
of that section, to try to characterize ethics in general; I then briefly
introduced several branches of ethics, such as theory of value and theory
of conduct, and created articles for each of the branches.  Then, I have
not yet but I will further prise out of the articles on the branches
(which are themselves very long) more articles about particular ethical
theories and concepts, like eudaimonism and eudaimonia.

This requires that we repeat what we say in articles quite a bit.  In some
of my articles, I have actually cut and pasted bits of text from one
article to another.  Actually, I think this is a *good* thing.  The
purpose of encyclopedia articles is to convey human knowledge *on
particular subjects* in a way that can be absorbed as easily as the
subject allows.  So, if I write about ethics and mention what the theory
of value is, and then repeat the same thing (in more detail) in the theory
of value article, I have done a good job in fulfilling the purpose of
encyclopedia articles.  If someone wants to know about what ethics (as a
Western philosophical discipline)  is, it is pretty important that he or
she understand at least *what* the theory of value is.  One shouldn't have
to go to a separate article to find out what the theory of value is, in an
article on ethics, because part of what it is to understand what ethics is
*just is* to understand what the theory of value is.  But an understanding
of ethics doesn't require an understanding of all the topics necessary to
give a basic introduction to the theory of value.  To pick a very
specialized topic, you might wonder where to go to find out about Mackie's
moral irrealism; that's the sort of detail we might find in an article on
irrealist meta-ethics, or an article on Mackie's moral irrealism.  Not in
an article on ethics, for good reason.

The next part is important: the above implies that there is a distinction
between the essential and the nonessential with regard to any topic, and
that we focus on the essential when we're writing on the topic, saving the
nonessential for more specialized or for tangentially related articles.
And *this* is difficult, sometimes.  It requires a kind of thinking that
mere amassers-of-fact are sometimes not familiar with.  I think that just
goes to show you that encyclopedias need more than amassers-of-fact.  They
also need people who really understand the facts and can organize them in
articles appropriate to their level of generality--rather than just
shoving them willy-nilly into one catch-all article patched together like
a Frankenstein monster, with no rhyme or reason.  That's sort of what I
think of when I think of subsections and subpages.  It implies a certain
degree of sloppy, disorganized thinking.

But how can we, in practice, distinguish the essential from the
nonessential?  Like this: we realize that topics in Wikipedia are
individuated by their names.  One name (or cluster of near synonyms), one
topic.  Then we ask ourselves: "*Given that* we will also have articles
introducing related topics X, Y, and Z, that our readers will be able to
consult, and so on down to the most detailed of topics--so that we don't
*need* to repeat here all the details of X, Y, and Z--what is really left
that's necessary to say in order to understand the meaning or significance
of the person, concept, event, etc., right now at hand, and provide the
context necessary to understand the articles on the 'subtopics'?"

In writing that article about ethics, for example, I know that we're going
to have articles on the theory of value, meta-ethics, applied ethics, and
so forth, and it certainly isn't necessary that I repeat the details that
I know will be in those articles (or that I repeat the details that will
be in even more specialized articles linked to from *those* articles).
So I'm off the hook as far as giving a complete, erudite exposition of
ethics is concerned.  What, then, do I need to say about ethics in order
to convey a basic understanding of ethics, *and* provide the basic context
necessary to understand the articles on the next level of generality down?

An article on theory of value shouldn't have to repeat, at least in much
detail, what ethics is supposed to be (what sort of definitions have been
offered, say).  So the article on ethics should at least give a
definition.  Moreover, the theory of value article can probably "rely" on
the ethics article to explain some of the basic interrelations between the
different branches of ethics.

Larry