Summary style (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Response to Bryan Derken)

Tue Jun 8 18:40:58 UTC 2004

--- Abe Sokolov <abesokolov at hotmail.com> wrote:
>...
> On that note, reconsider this point from an earlier posting:
> 
> "Notice that as the reader moves down the page, the narrative builds on 
> points already established in the text. Unless someone rewrote and 
> significantly expanded each section of the article, Bryan's proposals 
> would've left the individual components of the series superficial at best 
> and incoherent at worst."
> 
> ....
> 
> "As the Democrats were grappling with their own troubles [What troubles?], 
> radicals in the Republican party [Who are the "radicals?"] fought against 
> the idea of "non-extension" [What's "non-extension?"] and fought to keep the 
> focus on the issue of slavery in the West [What issue of slavery in the 
> West? What contention?], which allowed them to mobilize a great deal of 
> popular support [Why is this the case?], at the focal point of political 
> discourse. Chase [Who's Chase?] wrote Sumner [Who's Sumner?] that if the 
> conservatives succeeded [Who? Conservative relative to whom?], it might be 
> necessary to recreate the Free Soil party [What's the Free Soil Party?]. He 
> was also particularly disturbed by the tendency of many Republicans to 
> eschew moral attacks on slavery for political and economic arguments [Why?].

Just provide links and context via phrases and with parenthesis as needed. I
don't think anybody was proposing just ripping the text out and rearranging
things. 

> ...
> This should make it clear your proposals would require every single section 
> of the article to be rewritten, expanded, and recontextualized 
> significantly. (BTW, who's going to do that? I don't want to. I doubt that 
> Mav does; he wants less text-- not more text. Are you? If so, reorganization 
> comes with rewriting—and expanding—the entire entry) This is not as easy as 
> cut/paste, designing new boxes, and moving pages.

No - I want more text by adding a survey article that summarizes the whole
topic and provides links to the detailed parts that have already been written.
If those parts depend on context that has already been established by previous
parts, then those will have to have more context and links added so that they
can be both stand-alone articles and part of a series. 

We should not be writing in a way that assumes a person is going to read from
page 1 straight to page 30 in order to be able to make sense of any page in
between. Some people will only be concerned about content in a middle section,
others in content at the end. We are building an encyclopedia here, not a
collection of books (Wikibooks are organized in a linear way, however). So our
articles cannot assume too much about what the person has already read. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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