--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Although there is much merit to having the initial section of an article give a general overview of the topic. I don't think that the application of "news style should extend any further than that. Wikipedia is not a newspaper. Being able to drop paragraphs at the end of an article to fit the available space is fine for newspapers who have short daily deadlines to meet. The weeklies have more freedom on this and monthlies and quarterlies even more.
A biographical article needs to present the person's life in a chronological structure. Many famous people had some of their most significant events at the end of their lives. What would a biography of Lincoln or Kennedy be like if we had to cut the story of their assassination as a means of making those articles shorter?.
That is exactly why I support Summary Style instead of News Style. The "dropability" part does not apply to what we are doing and strictly speaking News Style only provides for lead sentences, not lead sections.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Summary_style
Summary Style is somewhat similar in spirit to News Style, except it tries to apply the concept to Wikipedia, which is most certainly not a newspaper. It aims to not overwhelm readers with too much info up front and tries to offer summaries under prominent "Main article"-type links in sections. That way we serve several different types of users; *those that want a quick summary of what the topic is about (lead section), *those that want a basic summary (a set of several paragraph long sections - subsectioning can increase the number of paras), *and those that want to go into more detail ('Main article' links to articles which cover a sub-topic summarized in a section).
But articles *should not* start out like this. Summary Style is more of a set of guidelines on how to split long articles (>40-50KB) into a set of daughters. Each of those daughters could eventually become large enough to bud out articles of its own. And so on - not unlike cellular division.
Also, most good lead sections should be usable as concise encyclopedia articles in their own right. Some more expansive topics, such as major wars, will also need to have overviews, however. Overviews should have important info not contained in or barely mentioned in the lead section. Together these lead sections and overviews could be used almost directly in a desk reference concise version of Wikipedia.
This division of content also makes it possible to create many different kinds of topic-based encyclopedias for print/DVD/CD; A general one would only have survey articles while a specific topic encyclopedia would have all the survey and daughter articles in its topic area. Creating a meta tagging system would help facilitate this by automating what goes where (this is a bit beyond the purpose of categories, IMO, but they *could* be used for this if needed).
The important question comes down to is it better to have a large number of short articles, or a much smaller number of comprehensive, well-written and thoughtful articles.
In terms of content, not really articles, we can and should have both. This can be done by splitting long articles and leaving a good-sized summary of that article in a section of a survey article on the topic.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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