[Wikipedia-l] A quick thought about 1.0

[Arvind Narayanan]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 09:58:13AM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Erik wrote:
> >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. 
> 
For me there's a huge difference. My latency on wikipedia
is usually between 5 and 10 seconds. OTOH I have high bandwidth.
So I would greatly prefer to download a huge article at once.
> >I think an article should have as much information   
> >related to its title as possible for that reason, and 
> >things should only be split off if a certain maximum 
> >size is reached (I tend towards 30-40K), or if they 
> >are not really related. 
> 
> I really hate duplication of effort; If article A refers to event B and 
Why is this duplication of effort? We can simply copy-paste from one
article to the other.
> 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. 30-40 KB is unreadably long 
> for all but the most important topics (such as a major world conflict where 
> simply providing short summaries of the major points would yield an article 
> of that length). A max of 15-25 KB minus markup is more readable for most 
> topics. 
> 
> It is much better to chop things up into digestible bits. Then summaries of 
I would characterize it as an information dump which forces the reader
to make an effort to extract a coherent picture out of it. Further, it is
often not possible to deduce what is the topic of the article in an
outgoing link (the link text is usually a single word), so I click
something and find its not what I wanted and get annoyed.

Arvind
-- 
Its all GNU to me