[Wikipedia-l] Summary style is better (was: Action plan for 1.0 - news style intros should be recommended more strongly)

Tue Jul 20 19:58:35 UTC 2004

--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> 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?.

That is exactly why I support Summary Style instead of News Style. The
"dropability" part does not apply to what we are doing and strictly speaking
News Style only provides for lead sentences, not lead sections. 

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Summary_style 

Summary Style is somewhat similar in spirit to News Style, except it tries to
apply the concept to Wikipedia, which is most certainly not a newspaper. It
aims to not overwhelm readers with too much info up front and tries to offer
summaries under prominent "Main article"-type links in sections. That way we
serve several different types of users; 
*those that want a quick summary of what the topic is about (lead section), 
*those that want a basic summary (a set of several paragraph long sections -
subsectioning can increase the number of paras), 
*and those that want to go into more detail ('Main article' links to articles
which cover a sub-topic summarized in a section). 

But articles *should not* start out like this. Summary Style is more of a set
of guidelines on how to split long articles (>40-50KB) into a set of daughters.
Each of those daughters could eventually become large enough to bud out
articles of its own. And so on - not unlike cellular division. 

Also, most good lead sections should be usable as concise encyclopedia articles
in their own right. Some more expansive topics, such as major wars, will also
need to have overviews, however. Overviews should have important info not
contained in or barely mentioned in the lead section. Together these lead
sections and overviews could be used almost directly in a desk reference
concise version of Wikipedia. 

This division of content also makes it possible to create many different kinds
of topic-based encyclopedias for print/DVD/CD; A general one would only have
survey articles while a specific topic encyclopedia would have all the survey
and daughter articles in its topic area. Creating a meta tagging system would
help facilitate this by automating what goes where (this is a bit beyond the
purpose of categories, IMO, but they *could* be used for this if needed).

> 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.

In terms of content, not really articles, we can and should have both. This can
be done by splitting long articles and leaving a good-sized summary of that
article in a section of a survey article on the topic.  

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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