We will never solve the problem of structuring--different encyclopedias at various times have done it quite opposite. (Some French encyclopedias have even consisted of 5 or 6 very long volume length articles, divided in an elaborate scheme to a number of subsections. Recall that the print Brittanica for many years was divided into two separate parts, one with long articles, one with short ones--and with many subjects having a different article in each section.
In an electronic encyclopedia using structured information, and sufficiently elaborate metadata and frameworks, to provide the different frameworks, the reader would be able to convert back and forth between separated and combined formats, just like an electronic map can display one or more layers . The problem is not structure. The problem is that people take having a separate article as an indicator of importance, and will continue to do so. Readers have expectations, and we write for them, not ourselves, so we need to conform to what they expect of an encyclopedia format. But another problem is content: in an open edited encyclopedia with no enforceable editorial guidelines, experience shows that the content of individual items in long articles will tend to shorten, and combining into large articles loses information. When there are short articles, people tend to want to make them longer, and they look for and add information--information sometimes in unencyclopedic detail. We are spending far too much time debating over structure of individual articles--it would be much better to have fixed conventions for different types of articles, and everyone write to them. Deliberately taking a field I do not work in, we could for example decide that all the athletic teams of a college will be grouped in one article separate from the college, regardless of importance and regardless of how how long or short the resulting article is. Or we could decide that for some sports, such as football, we would always make a separate article if there were a varsity team. Either way, people would know where to write the material. (I am not advocating for doing either one of them, except to say that either one would be simpler to deal with than a mixture, and after their first experience with the encyclopedia, people would know where to look. according to reader choice. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 9:04 AM, Carcharoth <carcharot...@googlemail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Charles Matthews > <charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > > <snip> > >> Some of the more high-profile associated topics of >> notable topic X can be mentioned in the article on X, but that doesn't >> mean they are all worth a separate article. Such decisions should go >> case-by-case, but in general terms they are about structuring of >> content, rather than permissible content. > > Structuring of content is an interesting question. Sometimes small > stubs are better than a list, as it is easier to link to separate > articles than to items in a list, especially if there is no real > unifying structure for the list. Sometimes it takes a while to work > out what list, or summary article, something should be part of, but if > done well, that can work well. > > But sometimes separate articles is the way to go. Even if the > individual articles are unlikely to be much more than a GA-level > article at best, the separate articles approach has several > advantages, even if some content gets duplicated across several > articles. > > Carcharoth > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
