[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia and detail

[Timwi]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> 
>>The more ardent deleters have indeed put articles up for deletion for being
>>"too detailed".
> 
> Hm. I haven't seen that one yet, ... That's grounds for pruning text
> or splitting an article and not grounds for deletion.

My point exactly.  Detail does belong in Wikipedia.

> Eh, there are some subarticles that are out of date because people
> find the main one and edit it while the sub article doesn't get any
> love and attention.

Then I guess that means the organisation has failed.  In fact, I can 
think of an example.  At some point (I was new to Wikipedia at the time) 
I decided to write something about UTF-8, because this is something I 
find interesting and something I think I know about.  However, for 
reasons I don't know, I went to [[Unicode]] rather than [[UTF-8]].  The 
article had a section on UTF-8, but that section was not very detailed, 
so I decided to add all the detail I know about UTF-8 to that article, 
not knowing that the same detail already existed on [[UTF-8]].  If the 
section had had a link in the form of "for more detail, see [[UTF-8]]", 
this would not have happened.  So, the problem is not that there is too 
much detail about UTF-8, but rather that the detail is not organised in 
such a way that people will find it.

> Also, when you start splitting articles you end up
> with a lot of duplicated material that can make reading all of them
> (when you are really interested) tedious.

Again, this is a question of organisation.  I would contend that it is 
always possible, albeit sometimes extremely hard, to organise the 
material in such a way that very little material (if not even no 
material at all) is duplicated, to the point that reading all of it is 
no longer tedious.

> For example, consider
> articles about characters in works of fiction vs the text on the
> characters all gathered up under the work in question, or  an article
> 'Characters used in soandsos writings' + redirects.

I don't think this question should be asked this generally.  Some 
characters are so major that they deserve an article of their own, while 
others are minor and should be covered in a more general article (such 
as the one on the work of fiction itself, or something like [[Minor 
characters from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]).

In fact, this is one example of a very noticeable difference between the 
English and German Wikipedias.  In English, we have an article on 
[[Vulcan (Star Trek)]], while the German Wikipedia apparently has a 
policy against such articles and requires the topic to be covered on an 
article about all Star Trek fictional races.  As a result, the German 
Wikipedia will never acquire the amount of detail that we have on the 
Vulcans.  Of course, the prevailing opinion in the German Wikipedian 
community is that this level of detail is unwanted, so people don't see 
a problem with it.  I am very glad that the same is not true of the 
English Wikipedia, allowing volunteers to write about what they find 
interesting rather than what some admins deem "wanted".

Timwi

>>>>There is a place in the world for large amounts of detailed material,
>>>>but this shouldn't be the goal of an encyclopedia.
>>>
>>>Funny, and somehow I thought that the goal of Wikipedia is to "collect
>>>the sum of human knowledge".
>>
>>Haven't you heard? Our new slogan is "Wikipedia is full. Go away." Now only
>>*deserving* articles are kept (whatever that means); all others apparently
>>have to make their case or be deleted in a consensus vote of three versus
>>one.
> 
> 
> Wikipedia isn't the only place in the world to store knowledge. It's
> clear that we already are aware of that, which is why we have
> wikibooks, wikiquotes, and wiktionary.
> 
> If I gave you an algorithm that generated an infinite amount of text
> without ever repeating itself I could rightly tell you that the answer
> to any question you might ask is in the output. But you find this very
> useful.
> 
> There is value in being concise, there is value to partitioning, and
> there is value to excluding.
> 
> *Wikipedia is not paper*. I see this often cited, but I think it is
> often cited by people who fail to grasp all of the implications, for
> example: We have a search engine, redirects, and hyperlinks, so every
> subject doesn't need an article of its own; people can be expected to
> find material inside other articles.  We can provide instanious links
> to detailed information in millions of places all over the Internet as
> well as information contained in other wikimedia projects, so it is
> not optimum to provide all possible details in every article.
> 
> Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. This implies a relationship between the
> reader and the material (he is searching a lot and looking for more
> basic information on average), and it implies things  about the
> creation of material (citations, avoiding original research, NPOV,
> trying to include a more general audience).  Some content is best
> created and presented under a different set of criteria.  By excluding
> this content, and perhaps giving it a home of its own, we improve
> useablity for everyone.