[Wikipedia-l] Limits to the non-paperiness of Wikipedia?

Fri May 30 00:33:36 UTC 2003

Erik Moeller wrote in part:

>Long articles have several advantages:
>* The same goes for links: The less articles there are, the less double
>redirects, the less links that need to be manually edited and so on

Actually, I think that long articles will cause more redirects.
Consider [[en:Neighbourhood (topology)]].
Since the only material on this topic is a short definition,
it has no proper article but is listed on [[Topology glossary]].
So [[Neighbourhood (topology)]] redirects to [[Topology glossary]].

But what about [[Neighorhood (topology)]] (with the US spelling)?
If I hadn't created this redirect as well,
then somebody else might have come along (following a red link),
redirected the alternate spelling to [[Neighbourhood (topology)]],
seen (from the resulting blue link) that this page did indeed exist,
but didn't look at it to discover that it was just a redirect.

Also, when [[Topology Glossary]] was moved to [[Topology glossary]],
a whole bunch of double redirects were created -- two examples above.

Despite all of this, I *don't* think that [[Neighbourhood (topology)]]
should be separated out.  Not because a long article couldn't be written
(it could, and I intend to write one when I get around to it,
as I intend to write articles on every term in that glossary),
but because the article would be only a single sentence *now*.
I think that your 20KB suggestion is too long for a minimum size,
like others here, but I do basically agree with your main point.
I write this to emphasise that everybody -- in this situation and others --
should take time out to think about redirects
and how the actions that we take may impact them or require them.

-- Toby