Cunc-
Well, that's nice, but it's not fair or
appropriate for you to assume
that what you like should be mandated for all.
That argument can be applied in both directions. So unless you come up
with a very good scheme thad does not substantially affect performance, is
easy to use and allows different "views" of an article, we'll have to go
with what the majority prefers (and make some concessions to the
minority). Given the experience of the recent poll on the Rick Santorum
article, I find it likely that your view is a minority position.
I, for one, when I read a sentence like
The [[asthetic appeal of sport]]
That should be "aestehtic", btw.
But if we take the case of [[professional sports]],
the [[sport]]
article discusses how professional sports rises from sport's appeal as
passive entertainment, how professional sports have given rise to
several related industries, and how professional sports comes into
conflict with the concept of amateur sportsmanship.
The level of detail of this "discussion" is as high as the level of detail
of the above paragraph. In other words, there is almost no information in
it that goes beyond what virtually everyone knows. That is the kind of
paragraph that makes articles look unprofessional unless you are fully
aware when reading it that there is much more detail available. Print it
and it looks really silly. "Participants are paid *by the audience* in
professional sports? Wow, I didn't know that! Wikipedia is so
informative!"
Who knows? The longer the entry, the more difficult it
becomes to
properly edit its subsections--or to entirely reorganize it if
necessary.
Um, reorganizing won't exactly become easier with 20 or so separate
articles where in many cases nobody will know where any specific piece of
information is.
But I get the feeling that what feels
"professional" to you is "what
would look best on paper".
Not really, it's just that for me, the differences between what is good on
paper and what is good on a computer screen are not that big. There's a
certain hypertext myth that says that a "real" hypertext page needs to be
small and full of links to other hypertext pages. In terms of usability
studies, this has been found to be highly confusing and ineffective.
Having links is good, but they should lead to reasonably sized chunks of
information. The more fragmented an article is, the higher the likelihood
that people will be frustrated by lots of tiny stubs.
I'm sorry, but I don't think that it's
appropriate to take editing
changes like this personally. It's counterproductive to collaboration
and egocentric. Taking edits for structure personally doesn't help
anyone.
It is not an irrational feeling. If you disagree with what someone has
done to your article, then your own investments of time and energy into it
are called into question, the other person in effect tries to *condition*
you to behave in a certain way. It is therefore really a minimum
requirement for collaboration to ask before making major changes, and to
try to achieve consenus.
You know very well that your changes to [[sports]] probably would not have
found consensus if you had announced them beforehand. And I believe that
is the reason you did not do so. Please try to follow the defined
Wikipedia decision making process. In case of minor changes, make them
immediately. In case of medium changes, make them and then comment (in the
edit summary or on the talk page). In case of major changes, announce them
first and wait for objections before making them. In case of objections,
seek consensus. In case of lack of consensus, you are free to start a
vote.
It's a lot better for everyone to get your high
from the act of selfless
contribution or the knowledge that you've insinuated your knowledge and
perspective invisibly into the stream. Once you contribute to Wikipedia,
it's *not your work* any more. The original contribution is, but that's
it. *You are explicitly agreeing to a merciless editing process*.
That is all well under the assumption that you agree with what the other
person has done. If you feel it makes the article worse, then this kind of
rhetoric falls apart.
It's reasonable and right to say "I think
your changes have hurt the
coverage of this issue in these ways". It's unreasonable to say "I'm
angry because you changed my entries, whether or not it's for the
better."
Of course. I never said it would be reasonable to be angry about changes
that are for the better. It is questionable whether we agree when this is
the case, though.
If you're so worried about credit, then write code
to allow people to
rename sections to new pages so that the version history is remembered.
That's not possible. You *can* split up the edit history (with *very* much
coding effort), but it will no longer make sense. Edit comments lose their
meaning, the linear structure of the history is broken up as edits which
were made to other sections between two edits of the same one are no
longer part of the new history, etc. Aside from that, cut&pasting is
typically not limited to clearly separable sections.
So losing proper credit is very much a given when cut&pasting out parts of
an article. This is probably also in material breach of the FDL. That's
one other major reason that it should not be done without consensus.
I feel that if you continue to split up articles in major ways without
announcing this on the talk page first and giving authors a chance to
react to your proposal, you are in serious violation of Wikiquette, and
possibly other policies.
Regards,
Erik