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

Fri May 30 20:16:40 UTC 2003

Erik Moeller wrote:

>Oliver Pereira wrote:

>>I think
>>that Web-based things should be tailored to the medium, and that means
>>that information should be arranged in a web-like structure.

>The question is, do we want relevant information on one subject to be
>grouped together, or do we want to *unnecessarily* use the "hypertext
>medium" just for kicks? The latter seems like a gimmicky thing to do,

Well of course it does, because it's a strawman
(uninentionally on your part, I'm sure).
Oliver doesn't want to use the medium for *kicks* --
even the people that worked on [[Gnipper]] (below) weren't doing that.

>>I don't think so. Merging small articles into big ones increases the
>>number of redirects floating around.

>Replacing all redirects to FOO with redirects to BAR is a job for a
>machine. Replacing all links to FOO with links to BAR is a job for a
>human, because you don't know in which verbal context these links appear.

I don't understand this comment.
Can you give an example (possibly hypothetical) of a situation
where you can contrast the effects of the different designs?

>>Erik Moeller wrote:

>>>* A short average article length does not reflect well on our article
>>>count, which is one of the key instruments used for size comparisons

>>It makes the count bigger, which is a *good* thing. :)

>No, it's not a good thing, if the next time someone does a random page
>sample for a review, they get 10 one-pargraph articles about fictional
>characters. This makes us look unprofessional.

Agh, everybody forget how we *look*.
We worry far too much about our article count and Randompage.
When I first discovered Wikipedia, I noticed two things: wiki and 'pedia.
We should stick to the subject, which is usability for readers and writers:
that's what'll attract people to the site and make us look professional.

>And the more such articles we have, the more difficult it becomes to
>enforce standards, to systematically copyedit articles about certain
>subjects etc. -- like Everything2, the whole database becomes increasingly
>messsy and unappealing to deal with. It's like the subpages mess we just
>barely avoided.

But another problem with subpages is still present.
That problem was that we didn't know if it was best
to structure things as [[Stuff/Chap's views]] or [[Chap/Views on Stuff]].
By placing all of Chap's views on Stuff in [[Chap]], you choose the latter.
By keeping [[Chap's views on Stuff]] separate, Oliver avoids the problem.

In practice, things will of course depend on the situation.
As you said, you and Oliver probably aren't that far apart in practice,
and I'm probably smooshed somewhere in the small space between you.
But when the section == Views on Stuff == or == Chap's views ==
(as the case may be) becomes long enough to stand on its own,
then I believe that it's often best to give it its own article,
with a brief summary (probably without header) in both [[Chap]] and [[Stuff]].
(I won't replace "often" with "always" in that sentence, however.)

I said before that I agreed with your main point,
because I thought that you were talking about things (like [[Gnipper]])
that are very short and would be only a single paragraph in an article.
But I disagree if you're talking about things of the size of subheaders,
or at least I'll disagree in many cases.

>>As for comparisons,
>>if you check other popular encyclopaedias, you'll find that many of them
>>have articles a lot shorter than 20 Kb.

>Certainly not about "Gnipper the dog". The point is: If you actually check
>out these articles, you notice that they are about subjects that can quite
>plausibly grow into reasonably long articles -- an author, a politician, a
>company spokesperson; a mechanical device, a philosophical concept, a
>published work .. We currently have plenty of small articles that can
>never be anything but small articles because their subjects are so
>insignificant.

For a published encyclopaedia, which is a finished work,
I don't think that the ability to grow into a long article
makes any difference for their purposes one way or another.
That does have some relevance to us, but not to them.
Rather, they don't have [[Gnipper]] -- even as a redirect! --
because they don't consider that character significant enough.
We, OTOH, are not paper, and it's significant enough if somebody writes it.

That doesn't mean that [[Gnipper]] should have its own article --
that depends on circumstances, and in this case it shouldn't,
since we simply don't have enough material to stand on its own
(regardless of whether such might ''potentially'' be available!).
It does mean that we can stick in a redirect, however,
and thus the distinction between us and EB is maintained.

IOW, for them, it's not about size at all, but significance.
Since we're not paper, we care only about size
(replacing significance to some extent with verifiability) --
and I agree with you about [[Gnipper]] on that basis of course! --
but comparisons with EB really have little significance,
for one side or the other, in this matter.

-- Toby