[WikiEN-l] Process wonkery

Tue Sep 26 14:18:28 UTC 2006

On 26/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 26/09/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So rambot usable lists of the data, and create a forest of redirects.
>
> School articles do need some sort of canonical naming format. [[School
> name, Town, State, Country]] or something equivalent - something like
> the naming format for cities and towns with school name on the front.
>
> This will (a) include all verifiable schools (b) having the entry be a
> redirect to a list until there's something real to write an article
> about will save on people coughing up their own skulls in disgust.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
I realise the opinion of just one person doesn't count for much here, but
I'd like to suggest the following for schools and all other "it exists,
therefore it should be on Wikipedia" items. I do to some extent subscribe to
that view. But I think there are far more logical ways in dealing with the
situation than "an article for every school" or "delete anything that isn't
nationally/regionally/historically notable".

Surely the thing to do is to concatenate entries of a related nature? Here
in Ireland even reasonably small towns have several schools. Surely a single
article can cover all the schools, with the individual schools getting their
own articles if there is too much content for that parent article? If there
are details added to Wikipedia for just one or two schools in an area,
surely they can be added to a related more important article such as the
town or area?

I'm not suggesting there wouldn't be awkward instances not covered by this,
but the concatenation approach should be used more widely on Wikipedia in my
opinion. If nothing else, it would ensure that we have decent "parent"
articles when very narrow topics later have their own articles. There are
far too many situations where we have articles on the minuitia of things,
and poorly scratched together ones, or non-existent ones for the broader
topic (often such articles don't even do something quick and cheap to
improve things, like scraping the introductory paragraph from the
sub-articles).

Zoney

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