On 07/19/04 01:53, Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Mark Ryan <ultrablue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
If we are
meant to be only be using short stubbish articles for
everything (I have heard some people saying using only the first
paragraph of articles), then how will we keep this separate from the
main articles? Go the same way as monobook.css and have it like
[[Christianity/stub]]? There are little conceptual problems that need
to be thought through before we jump in head-first into preparing for
this.
Section 0 of every article should ideally have a
lead section in it
that acts
as a concise summary of the entire article. Each of those lead
sections should
then be usable as concise encyclopedia articles in a single volume desk
reference (with maybe an overview also thrown in for some subjects).
Selection
of articles and validation of those sections would still be needed,
of course.
Thus nothing need be compromised on Wikipedia.
Absolutely. That's why a strict [[news style]] [[inverted pyramid]]
intro -
first sentence, first paragraph, following paragraphs in order of
droppability
- is my very favourite article intro style.
Currently, [[Wikipedia:News style]] speaks of it as almost optional.
I strongly suggest this status be upgraded, something like: "Although
optional, a news style intro is strongly recommended if you want an
article
to be in Wikipedia 1.0 - many print articles are likely to be only the
intro
of the web article." Thoughts?
(Note that none of the 1.0 plans so far detract from the live wiki
itself,
and in fact would increase both its coverage and quality in useful ways.)
Although there is much merit to having the initial section of an article
give a general overview of the topic. I don't think that the
application of "news style should extend any further than that.
Wikipedia is not a newspaper. Being able to drop paragraphs at the end
of an article to fit the available space is fine for newspapers who have
short daily deadlines to meet. The weeklies have more freedom on this
and monthlies and quarterlies even more.
A biographical article needs to present the person's life in a
chronological structure. Many famous people had some of their most
significant events at the end of their lives. What would a biography of
Lincoln or Kennedy be like if we had to cut the story of their
assassination as a means of making those articles shorter?.
I can see that the desire to have a large number of articles is driving
the move the have severable opening stubs.
The important question comes down to is it better to have a large number
of short articles, or a much smaller number of comprehensive,
well-written and thoughtful articles.
When it is finally published, the hype will have preceded the event, and
created high expectations. Which would be a better review?
1. The new paper Wikipedia is a collection of short articles. The
material appears very accurate, but any person who browses the net
could have found all this very easily. Why did they bother?
or
2. The new paper Wikipedia is a series of interesting and very
informative article. Interspersed are a number of shorter articles with
a promise that these subjects will receive more thorough treatment in
the future. We look forward to those future editions.
Ec
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