On 1/12/06, Haukur Þorgeirsson <haukurth(a)hi.is> wrote:
(This discussion is on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changes_in_immigrant_groups_extended_family_po…
)
Actually I don't think the topic is at all
appropriate for an
encyclopedia. It'd make a good essay, but I seriously doubt you'd see
such a title (or indeed any which start out "Changes in...") in, for
example, Britannica. For Wikipedia sometimes we get strange article
titles like this for what is really a subpage of another article, but
that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Nevertheless it would be possible to write a well-referenced article on
this topic in encyclopedic style and if we had such an article it would be
kept if brought up for AfD.
Maybe it would be kept, I'm not sure, but we weren't really talking
about what would happen but rather what should happen. An article at
that title just shouldn't exist, in my opinion, regardless of how well
written it is.
This does touch on the question of how to break up articles which are
too large, though. For example, we have an article, [[Responsibility
for the September 11, 2001 attacks]], even though such an article
title would probably never be found in a traditional encyclopedia.
But I see that as really a sub-article more than an article in itself.
In that vein, maybe [[Changes in immigrant groups extended family
positions]] would make sense as a sub-article of [[extended family]]
or [[immigration]], but barring some space considerations in those
parent articles I'd rather see it merged, regardless of the quality of
the text.
How would you recommend we proceed?
Redirect to [[extended family]] (optionally merging if you think it's
worthwhile).
I don't think it's worthwhile, I think it's worthless.
Fair enough. I was more thinking if the person making the redirect
thought any parts of it could be easily salvaged. Personally, if I
were the one fixing it, I'd just make the redirect without any merge
at all.
But why should we have a redirect there?
Because the system doesn't support semi-deletion, and redirects keep
the information there for someone else to fix. I'm not confident
enough to say that no one could ever find any of that information
useful for making an encyclopedia, so I wouldn't feel comfortable
deleting it. Making a redirect is easily reversible should someone
disagree with my decision, and yet it doesn't require bothering a
large group of people to see whether or not they agree.
The tiny bit of disk space the content takes up in the mean time is
not, in my opinion, worth the time it takes to have a discussion on
whether or not to remove it.
The title is, as you noted, ridiculously long and
clumsy so no-one is likely to type it in. And the article has no incoming
links. Shouldn't we just delete it?
In my opinion, no, we shouldn't. But I'm going on the assumption that
the content wasn't complete patent nonsense, and therefore not
*completely* worthless.
In any case I realize that since you feel that the
topic of the article is
inappropriate for Wikipedia this was not in fact a good example for the
discussion we were having :)
I guess. When I made the statement I was more thinking about an
article title which we absolutely should include. Maybe my statement
was a bit overbroad in not taking these titles which I referred to as
"sub-articles" into consideration.
Thanks for taking a look!
Regards,
Haukur
Sure thing.
Anthony