[Wikipedia-l] A quick thought about 1.0

[Erik Moeller]

Daniel-
>> I feel that it is extremely tedious to have to click around
>> many times and load many pages to get a complete
>> picture of an issue, a person etc.

> There is little difference between clicking on a TOC link in a huge article
> than clicking on a link to another article.

When I read an article about a well defined subject, and I want to get all  
the information about it, I don't click around at all. I just read the  
article from top to bottom. I might skip a certain section, but I don't  
need to click anywhere. And when I do use the TOC, it is substantially  
faster in terms of latency than browsing of separate articles. Not only do  
I not need to wait for the page to load, I can also easily get context --  
information about where I am within the structure of a topic -- simply by  
scrolling, rather than using back->click->back->click..

If I have an article like [[sports]], after Cunctator split it up into  
lots of tiny fragments, this possibility is no longer there. To some  
extent I agree with the split ups, but I find it questionable whether  
[[professional sports]], [[aesthetic appeal of sport]], [[nationalism and  
sport]], [[female sport]] etc. should really be separate entries. Even  
worse is that the article has a long list of "See also"s -- these are one  
of the worst ways to structure information.

In my experience, separating articles so much also leads to  
inconsistencies in style and neglect of articles about fringe subjects.  
For example, I predict that the newly created [[regulation of sport]] will  
be neglected, while I believe it would not have been if it had been kept  
as a section within the article. The reason is simply reduced exposure.

> I really hate duplication of effort; If article A refers to event B and
> article C also refers to event B, it is MUCH better to simply have an
> article about B and short summaries in articles A and C.

I don't accept this as a general rule. It depends on the importance of the  
reference within each article. If the reference in article C is minor, it  
may well be completely acceptable to link to a larger article where event  
B is discussed. But there are of course many cases where for reasons of  
redundancy reduction this principle applies.

> 30-40 KB is
> unreadably long for all but the most important topics
> ... A max of 15-25 KB minus markup is more
> readable for most topics.

Well, these are mere statements of opinion. And of course the amount of  
information that people can stomach in one sitting varies greatly. I do  
notice, however, that these are not so far apart. If you take my minimum  
and your maximum and take the average, you arrive at 27.5K, which seems  
reasonable to me. The sports article is currently a mere 5K, which is IMHO  
a clear sign that it is far too fragmented. It also has no real summaries  
of the sub-articles it links to. Overall it gives a very unprofessional  
impression to me.

I would also probably be very pissed if Cunc had done this, without prior  
discussion as in this case, to one of "my" articles. One key reason is  
that the history gets completely lost in the process. Sure, you can still  
fish it out, but people will assume that Cunc wrote the individual pieces.  
I have invested many days of research in some articles I worked on, and  
getting fair credit in the page history is very little to ask for in  
return. Having a carefully planned out article structure messed up in this  
way would also make me quite angry. Be bold, but also be respectful toward  
other people's work.

> /That/ is far more useful for the reader ..

I'm glad that you are so confident that you are correct. For me the issue  
is still quite foggy. While I agree with you that summaries of subsections  
are useful, I feel they should not be created needlessly. That is, if  
we're below a certain size -- maybe the 27.5K from above -- we don't need  
to split the article up unless there is a clear logical separation. For  
example, in the [[Mother Teresa]] article we split away everything that is  
about the [[Missionaries of Charity]] (Teresa's order), which is fine with  
me because there's a clear distinction here. But stuff like "History of  
.." should really only be split off if we're approaching the size limit,  
in my opinion. Otherwise the disadvantages of splitting appear to outweigh  
the advantages.

Regards,

Erik