On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Pondering the utility of talk page edits recently,
I've begun to
wonder: how many of our readers actually look at the talk page as
well? I know some writers writing articles on Wikipedia have mentioned
or rhapsodized at length on the interest of the talk pages for
articles, but they are rare birds and statistically irrelevant.
<snip long analysis>
I suggest that the common practice of 'moving
reference/link to the
Talk page' be named what it really is: a subtle form of deletion.
Well, only if there is no discussion. I think moving to the talk page
is far better than outright removal. It does at least give editors a
chance to review what has been included and what has been excluded.
And talk pages *should* be for editors and not really for readers. I
frequently use the talk pages to help draft articles and as a place to
put material that I'm not quite sure is ready for inclusion yet.
Putting everything straight into an article can make it harder to
organise things later.
It would be a service to our readers to end this
practice entirely: if
a link is good enough to be hidden on a talk page (supposedly in the
interests of incorporating it in the future*), then it is good enough
to put at the end of External Links or a Further Reading section, and
our countless thousands of readers will not be deprived of the chance
to make use of it.
I agree absolutely that external links and further reading should be
used far more than they are. I think the problem is that people are
paranoid about link farms and link spam and look at number of links
rather than quality or organisation. It does help to organise very
large external link sections into subsections, both to help readers
(in finding what may be of interest) and the editors (in trimming
where needed and organsing what is there).
* one of my little projects is compiling edits where I
or another have
added a valuable source to an article Talk page, complete with the
most relevant excerpts from that source, and seeing whether anyone
bothered making any use of that source/link in any fashion. I have not
finished, but to summarize what I have seen so far: that justification
for deletion is a dirty lie. Hardly any sources are ever restored.
If there is no discussion, you would be fully justified in adding the
source yourself. If there is discussion, then, well, you need to
discuss. Have a look at my recent talk page edits for one way in which
I use article talk pages. The other aspect to all this is that many
editors make editorial decisions silently, in their head, or briefly
mentioned in edit summaries, and it can be hard for later editors to
understand why something was cut or trimmed down. If a longer
explanation is posted to the talk page, that can help, though for the
largest articles, having mini-essays on the talk page explaining how
each individual section of the article was put together would be a
massive undertaking. What I do think would be helpful is a subpage for
each article (or article talk page), listing the rejected material
(sometimes the material is better placed in a different article). That
would save a lot of repetition and aid organisation not only of the
included material, but the excluded material.
Carcharoth