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

Sat May 31 18:53:00 UTC 2003

Oliver-
>> 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.

I have seen solid arguments for splitting *some* articles up, because of  
the linkability issue. Articles should only be split up to the point where  
linking to individual sections is necessary and this cannot be  
accomplished through redirects. They can also be split up where a section  
is likely to be relevant in many different contexts, in which case it  
probably also fulfills my "can be expanded" criterion. And I agree that  
long discussions that distract from the substance of the article should be  
moved elsewhere, but again, these will probably fufill my length  
criterion.

I do not agree with Fred Bauder, on the other hand, who feels that there  
should be *many* small articles. The above arguments are applicable to  
exceptions, and even in these cases, we are splitting articles into  
smaller ones which can, hopefully in most cases, realistically be  
expanded.

> 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.

Well, at this point I can't really read minds yet, so I don't know if the  
people who supported having short articles would or would not want  
articles about fictional characters. But I'm happy to know that you don't  
like the little bastard either.

> 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)

No, of course that article should not be merged into another one. I  
believe I used the words "If an article can realistically be expanded ..".  
I think this article can quite realistically be expanded to 20-30K, even  
if nobody will ever do it. It mentions that Cyrus Cantrell wrote over 100  
papers, for example. What are they, which ones are relevant? Why did he  
get into photonics? Etc. etc.

For my favorite example Gnipper, on the other hand, it seems unlikely that  
we really want the kind of information that *could* blow this article up  
to massive proportions, since most of it would probably come from Internet  
fandom and as such have the stigma of low verifiability. So the article  
about Gnipper could still "conceivably" get very long, but in my opinion  
not "realistically". This is an important distinction.

Regards,

Erik