[WikiEN-l] Re: article size

Tue May 24 00:39:47 UTC 2005

"Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>> It does bring up the interesting point that perhaps there should be a
>> little more editing in making a paper version besides just validating
>> articles.  For example, it might make sense to collate these all into
>> one article for print publication.
>
> That can be done via transclusion. A container article would have =Level 
> 1=
> headings that would have the names of each component article. Then in a 
> print
> version, {{main|blah}} would need to be changed from 'Main article: 
> [[blah]]'
> to 'For further detail see [[blah]]' (might be a good idea anyway).

Wouldn't that be nice if it would work; but I think that would introduce an 
awful lot of redundancy and tedious repetition, since most of the component 
articles include phrasing to introduce and contextualize them as standalone 
articles. This might be a good way to generate an initial rough-cut, but 
some editing would certainly be needed. Otherwise we'd end up with the 
inverse of what technical writers used to call "shovelware", where paper 
documentation was simply dumped online with very little thought given to 
organization, presentation, or usability.

Bkonrad