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

Sat May 31 15:54:18 UTC 2003

I had decided to drop this, but I don't think it really ever got to
addressing the point I was interested in, so I'll carry on...

On 31 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:

> So far I have not seen any solid arguments for the practice of having
> many small, interlinked articles, other than "it's the web". This is why
> I am referring to that practice as "just for kicks". That's not a straw
> man, but it can be refuted by showing such arguments.

Yes, you have seen such arguments. You even laid out the arguments against
long (20 - 30 Kb) articles in a nice list for us a few days ago:

1. Hard to edit
2. No linkability to individual sections
3. Attention span

You mentioned a possible technical solution for the first one (ability to
edit individual sections), although this missed my point, which was that
it was difficult to *restructure* large articles, rather than to edit
within a pre-existing structure.

You mentioned a possible technical solution to the second one, but then
when I objected to linking to individual sections, you said, "Actually, I
tend to agree with you on that one." :)

You said the third one was "a valid argument", but that it could be solved
by proper structuring of the information. I agreed, but we disagreed on
what that proper structuring was. Except that in some circumstances,
"splitting off specific points, e.g. long criticism discussions, may be
desirable to avoid detracting from the main substance of the article", in
which case we agree.

So all three arguments still stand, to some degree.

> No. It may not be essential, but it is important. And how we look
> reflects on what we are (yeah, very deep, I know). If we consider every
> Gnipper relevant enough to get his own article, that says something
> about our standards of significance, too.

You have brought up these obscure fictional characters quite a few times
in this discussion now. This is a straw man argument if ever I saw one.  
No-one on the mailing list has ever stated that they want an article on
[[Gnipper]] and his friends, as far as I can recall.

If you will recall, I brought up the subject of article length in the
context of a 1,400 character article about a person, and I asked if it
really mattered if it was always going to remain under 10,000 bytes.
That's how this thing started. So please stop bringing up those damned
cartoon dogs, and tell me: is there any way of integrating a biographical
article into a larger one, without most of the information either seeming
out of place, or being omitted altogether?

My new test case is [[Cyrus Cantrell]], an example less likely to provoke
distracting emotional responses than the previous one - ignoring the
genealogical connection. Dr. Cantrell is a not especially well-known
academic in the field of engineering, who has done research in
[[photonics]]. Assuming that no-one ever expands his article up to 20,000
characters (which seems likely), do you propose merging his article into
another one? Possibly into [[photonics]], or into a new article for the
research centre he heads? Both of these would require omitting some
biographical material not directly relevant to his work - we don't
generally give people's full names, qualifications, and a list of posts
they hold if we're only mentioning them in the context of a larger
subject, so information would be lost. What do you propose?

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+