On 11/09/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Some people also say that short articles are more
likely to get edited.
I say:
1) They have to be found first.
I just tried this as an experiment: completely at random, I decided to
search for "sheep shearing", and was redirected (I pressed "Go" not
"Search") to [[Sheep shearer]].
Now, this is where it gets interesting: a large part of that article
describes something called "Blade shears". But if you put "Blade
shears" into the search box and click Go, you're taken to a search
page which doesn't list [[Sheep shearer]] anywhere on the first page.
The top two results - [[Shearing]] and [[Shears]] - both lead to a
disambiguation page that doesn't mention blade shears at all, either.
This is just one example, but it's something I've noticed a lot - if
what you're looking for has its' own article, you're a lot more likely
to find it than if it's part of another article.
This isn't, of course, due to mergism - if the article had been
merged, the redirect would've remained. But it illustrates the
limitations of the search engine, and highlights the danger of trying
to write large articles covering lots of stuff, rather than seperate,
interlinked articles.
Dan