On 1/27/08, Adrian <aldebaer(a)googlemail.com> wrote: http://www.flickr.com/photos/creativejuice/2219924668/in/pool-cdcovermeme Hilarious. Awesome. right? This particular article is about the year 1230, in which at least one noteworthy event occurred, according to at least one source, which (hopefully) at least one user can verify. Obviously an argument could be made for merging the stubbiest of "[year] in [whatever]" articles to the appropriate "[decade] in [whatever]" article via a redirect-to-section, e.g. Obviously any incoming links to such a redirect should remain as-is rather than being "fixed", as it's harder to identify the ones which ought to be changed back at a later time, especially in less obscure cases. But is it necessary to merge these? Are they really a problem? There are two basic schema for organizing content: 1. The portion-controlled model. Topics with more content are broken up into smaller articles and topics with less content are consolidated, in an effort to minimize deviation from the recommended article size. At any given moment, paragraphs are being cutnpasted from one pate to another, half of the incoming links need to be hand-checked, and attribution[1] is a royal pain in the ass. 2. The uniform-address model. Only when an article on one topic does become toofuckingbig does it get broken up into smaller articles. For the sake of consistency, articles on other topics in the same fundamental bracket (category) are broken up whether they need it or not. A wide variety of navigational boxes will help you find everything from [[Early life of Drew Barrymore]] to [[1992 in Eugene, Oregon]] to [[Game 3 (1998 NBA Finals)]] to [[The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in popular culture]].[2] If only you know what you're looking for, you'll know exactly where to find it (that is, once you learn all the silly little patterns, which themselves should could probably use a shot of consistency). The exact approach used is always somewhere in between, but nobody is going to agree on the the perfect balance between consistency of size and consistency of navigation. Some people will try too hard to make a dollar out of a fifteen-cent stub and end up with crap, others will casually shave legitimate content from a long article to avoid sub-dividing it [3]. Both of these urges should be fervently resisted. —C.W. [1] By "attribution" I refer not to any record-keeping required by the GFDL (which is supposedly satisfied by tracking all edits in the history tab of some page, somewhere, regardless of where the content ultimately resides), but to the more practical issue of being able to determine, years later, "who actually wrote this paragraph" after we notice that it is (a) excellent, suitable for framing, or (b) deeply troublesome, potentially libelous, cited to an unreliable and/or fictitious source, etc. [2] The latter can and would be a fascinating piece, actually. [3] Still others will lurk on "new page patrol" will take the freshly split-off sub-articles straight to AFD because they don't understand what's going on. After they are deleted, for whatever justification, a fourth group will revert anyone who attempts to restore the information to its original place in the parent article as a "reposting of deleted content". This is how prose gets lost in the bureaucratic sauce. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l