On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
If there is only one noteworthy fact about the
subject, the article
should probably be merged per BLP1E. If there isn't more than a
paragraph worth of stuff to say about a subject, you need to think
long and hard about whether there should be an article. In some cases,
there probably should, but I think it most cases such a lack of
information is a sign that the article should be deleted or merged.
This is certainly not the case in, for example, medieval history. It's
all relative to a background: what expectation is there of ample factual
material?
And another thing - I'd resist this in all cases where there was a place
for a person in a line of succession boxes. It is really no good merging
an article if it messes up some useful navigation.
Succession boxes are useful navigation? :-) In some places, and for
some things, yes, but succession boxes can be misused and overused,
like anything else. In particular, I hate those articles where someone
held multiple offices and titles and you see 5 or 6 succession boxes
(or those big list templates) crammed in at the bottom of the article.
Sure, I use them sometimes to find other articles, but they *look*
horrible and unprofessional.
Those big "list" or "topic" template (footer boxes?) are bad in other
ways as well. They mess up "what links here". There was a time when
"what links here" for a random Nobel laureate would get you relevant
links to articles related to that person. Now you get all the other
Nobel laureates in the list as well, and when the footer bloat is bad
you get totally unrelated articles appearing in "what links here"
because those articles appear somewhere in some broad topic template
that's been stuck on the bottom of 50 or so articles. Really annoying
- categories was (is!) meant to avoid that.
Carcharoth