[Wikipedia-l] Limits to the non-paperiness of Wikipedia?

[Oliver Pereira]

On 29 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:

> Long articles have several advantages:
> * A topic is kept in context, eliminating the need to write a separate  
> intro for each individual article

The context depends on the reader. What is the context of Chap's views on
Stuff? For someone interested in the life of Chap, the relevant context is
his life, and so they would want that section to be at [[Chap]]. For
someone interested in Stuff, the relevant context is that subject, and so
they would want the section to be at [[Stuff]]. Of course, there should be
mentions of his views in both articles, but to duplicate the whole lot
would cause problems. I think it would be better to have a separate
article on [[Chap's views on Stuff]], and have links to it from both
articles.

> * It becomes easy to save, print and pass around an article covering all  
> relevant information

Hmm. Keep Wikipedia articles as close to paper as possible, for ease of
conversion into paper. ;) Okay, maybe that's an unfair characterisation of
what you said, but I think that Web-based things should be tailored to the
medium, and that means that information should be arranged in a web-like
structure, not artificially forced into a one-dimensional structure like
traditional writing. It would be good to have a way to save related
articles together, but what is related depends on the reader, again. A
reader interested in Chap would want [[Chap]], [[Chap's views on Stuff]],
and [[Chap's views on Things]] saved together, whereas a reader interested
in Stuff would want [[Stuff]], [[Chap's views on Stuff]], and [[Guy's
views on Stuff]] all saved together. I expect a technical solution could
be thought up to enable readers to group articles for saving together,
according to their personal preferences. :)

> * We do not require the reader to click around unnecessarily, which can be  
> confusing to many people

I'm not sure I follow this argument. Isn't that what people do on the Web
all the time?

> * Should we decide on some major structural change or even a deletion, it  
> becomes easier to fix things
> * The same goes for links: The less articles there are, the less double  
> redirects, the less links that need to be manually edited and so on

I don't think so. Merging small articles into big ones increases the
number of redirects floating around.

> * A short average article length does not reflect well on our article  
> count, which is one of the key instruments used for size comparisons

It makes the count bigger, which is a *good* thing. :) As for comparisons,
if you check other popular encyclopaedias, you'll find that many of them
have articles a lot shorter than 20 Kb.

> The arguments against long articles:
> 
> Hard to edit:
> One of the features on my personal wishlist is the ability to edit an  
> individual article section.

Doesn't that give the reader more unnecessary things to click on, and
wouldn't that be confusing to many people? ;)

> No linkability to individual sections:
> Supporting a [[foo#bar]] style syntax is not the problem. However, keeping  
> these links working is non-trivial. It might be desirable to only have  
> this label functionality for some sections, instead of automatically  
> turning every section title into a label.

The whole idea of linking to individual sections is just so evil that I'm
going to have to write another whole e-mail on this subject...

> Attention span:
> This is a valid argument, but splitting up articles is not the solution:  
> instead of giving our reader easy access to the pertinent info, we now  
> hide it with the justification that it is "too much to read". The solution  
> is structure. Have a proper introduction with a decent summary, and put  
> every relevant piece of information into the right section. We could try  
> to develop guidelines for structuring articles in specific subject areas.

The solution *is* structure. We agree on that. I say use the natural
web-like structure of the Web; you say force things into a traditional
book-like structure. I say the latter is more off-putting for all those
people with short attention spans, who would be, I believe, the majority
of potential readers.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+