Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Modular Articles/Archive 1: Difference between revisions
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:That's a good point, and what I think we need is a way to point out where summary sections of articles reside. So say I want to write an article about [[HMS Beagle]], and I know that the article [[Second voyage of HMS Beagle]] already exists, then I'd want something that enables me to find out that the [[Charles Darwin]] article already contains a summary section that I can adapt. Summary sections could be strung together using categories, and a link to the category could be placed on the talk page of the detailed article. How does that sound? [[User:Samsara|Samsara]] ([[User talk:Samsara|talk]] <small>•</small> [[Special:Contributions/Samsara|contribs]]) 04:16, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
::I would agree--the application of this style in many long articles is mechanical. It may be a good fast way of breaking an article up--rather like an outline--but that shouldn't be the finished text. [[User:DGG|DGG]] 05:54, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
{{Clear}}
==Article size==
What are the intentions of this project with respect to [[Wikipedia:Article size]]? --[[User:Sadi Carnot|Sadi Carnot]] 02:07, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
:Can you tell me what the articles were that you've had problems with? - [[User:Samsara|Samsara]] ([[User talk:Samsara|talk]] <small>•</small> [[Special:Contributions/Samsara|contribs]]) 02:15, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, from experience, breaking up long pages is hard enough, even when you have consensus and other editors are helping with the breakup. I have not yet fully engaged in page breakup on tensioned pages. I have, however, tested the water in this respect. The [[entropy]] page is full of tension (it has religion/evolution conflicting themes); I have already broken it up twice, and it is still growing. Other examples of water testing are:
*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Photon/Archive2#Article_is_too_long_.2855_kb.29 Article is too long] (Photon)
*[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Evolution&diff=next&oldid=90603162 Tag revert] (Evolution)
*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Evolution#90_kb_article 90 kb article] (Evolution)
For example, I would like to contribute to the [[evolution]] article. I own about a dozen books on evolution, particularly Darwin-related, chemical-related, and thermodynamics-related books. Presently, this article is the longest science article at WP. If it is too long for me to want to contribute to, then I can image how others feel. If I were to break up the [[evolution]] article, by myself, through much argument and debate on the talk page, it would take exorbitant amounts of energy and weeks of time. The same for the photon article.
::may I suggest that you leave this alone as hopeless. There are some rather good neighboring articles, such as the one on [[Natural selection]][[User:DGG|DGG]] 05:54, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
When new users come into talk pages and suggest a page is long, e.g. see: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Evolution/Archive_020#Call_to_trim_article example], they get shot down in debate and go somewhere else. Myself, on the other hand, have no trouble arguing with dozens of people until the issue is resolved. But page breakups are a whole different ball game. There should be a civilize way to go about this process so that Wikipedia stays trimmed, tight, and distributed per topic. Storage space is unlimited. --[[User:Sadi Carnot|Sadi Carnot]] 02:45, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
:Well, I think the photon article is an interesting example. Its problem seems to stem mostly from the fact that it is not written for laypeople. Most of those equations should only, if ever, appear in more detailed sub-articles. The problem here would not be of simply shunting off material, but of completely rewriting large parts of the original article at the same time. - [[User:Samsara|Samsara]] ([[User talk:Samsara|talk]] <small>•</small> [[Special:Contributions/Samsara|contribs]]) 02:55, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
::Yes, I agree with you; but basically, it’s not that hard to open up some new pages, paste material there, do some cleanup work. Then let the new pages grow. My issue is not with the photon or evolution articles, directly, but with the fact that (a) articles stop growing when the page gets past 20 printed pages, (b) people stop reading when an article gets past 15 pages, and (c) talk pages of big articles are like bottle rockets constantly exploding. Periodically break up an article and these problems disappear. --[[User:Sadi Carnot|Sadi Carnot]] 03:06, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
:::or replicate[[User:DGG|DGG]] 05:54, 30 November 2006 (UTC).
::As a first step, we could establish a project page for this goal. Then, we could alert Wikipedians, via long page warning suggestions, on the [[Wikipedia:Long articles]] page, or discussion somewhere, etc., to add pages to our list that they feel are to long to read. Thus, firstly we can collect a list of pages in need of article breakup per request of other users. What do you think? --[[User:Sadi Carnot|Sadi Carnot]] 03:15, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
:::I would hesitate to make long page breakup an explicit goal of this project. I agree that it's great when the shortening of a page comes about as a result of modularising a page, and this is an implicit goal of the idea, but I don't think people are going to be very agreeable to the idea that we come along to "break up" their pages. My strongest objection is probably to the terminology. It shouldn't be about "breaking up", it should be about summarizing. The focus has to be right for it to work. - [[User:Samsara|Samsara]] ([[User talk:Samsara|talk]] <small>•</small> [[Special:Contributions/Samsara|contribs]]) 15:29, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
::::The chronological divisions used well in the Darwin series, and less cleverly in many history of ... series, are not the only way to break up an article, nor is it the only way used. One technique is to break apart a complex technical series into a number of short articles--and I think this is usually not a good idea. Another is to break out aspects. The obvious one is --History but this may not be ideal either as such a discussion tends to duplicate the main article. The very reasonable ''idea'' of doing evolution, and debate of evolution as separate pages will also not work, because the debaters are not going to leave the main page alone. In the group of pages about printing, the practice when I came here a few months ago seemed to be to give everyone his overlapping article do avoid edit wars--which didnt work either because the more aggressive editors tried to expand into adjacent articles.
::::This is much to early for us to try for rules--the landscape is littered with ill-considered rules. A number of the various Projects have dealt with this is different ways, and I suggest the best role here could be for general discussions of the topic, for even if a group acts in harmony, the whole body of editors won't. An additional benefit will be variety: the style of WP is very bland, and doing different things differently should help. I entered into this with a sense of obligation, to try to fix a few things I knew how to fix, but of course i stayed because it is also the best of the word oriented games.[[User:DGG|DGG]] 05:54, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I don’t understand, module means “a standard unit of measurement” [[Merriam-Webster]]. On this definition, here you two are exemplifying the [[evolution]] article, which happens to be the longest science article in Wikipedia, as a good example of modularization. I would say that the evolution article is an example of a Wiki module x 100. A module is supposed to be a small unit, not the longest example in a category. --[[User:Sadi Carnot|Sadi Carnot]] 10:06, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
:Think of Lego modules, and you get the idea. The aim would be to make sensible sub-units. Imagine an article about a food producing conglomerate. We would not be joining together the sections about salmon and cream into one module, just because they are adjacent. I expect that we would try to refactor articles in such a way that they become modularisable.
:Since you mention the evolution article, it was cited as an example of an article that ''is already'' modularised. I am doubtful it can be further compressed within the module framework. I think each section just needs careful review and rewriting for brevity. The evolution article is an example of an article that is never satisfying to a lot of people because it isn't written in their own personal style of writing, and to the other half because it has been rewritten too many times by different people, and reads quite badly as a result. It would no doubt read much better if Jimbo simply hired Mark Ridley to write it, and protected the final version, but duck - the pteranodons are flying low again today...
:So I think this project isn't what you are looking for. I apologise for being I mistaken in believing we had the same idea about things, but thank you for participating in the discussion - if you had not brought up your concerns, this project might not have got started. I hope we can achieve something positive. Regards, [[User:Samsara|Samsara]] ([[User talk:Samsara|talk]] <small>•</small> [[Special:Contributions/Samsara|contribs]]) 10:33, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I see that we have related but different agendas: you want to make generic paragraphs that can be copied verbatim and pasted as is into a number of other related articles. This is a novel idea, but keeping up with simultaneous multi-page edits on the same paragraph is difficult. Myself, I am primarily concerned with the following issue:
::"Wikipedia is now a [http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none top-12] website in the world with almost two million articles. That people read these articles is obvious. How much of each article the average person reads, however, is not so obvious. The average person stops reading, of course, when his or her reading tension span is broken. In this direction, Wikipedia articles are now only broken up when more than 50% of “editors” feel they are too long. The real question is, at what point do more than 50% of “readers” feel an article is too long? Hence, the famous motto “[[ignore all rules]]”, with respect to article size, is presently favored towards the editors rather than the readers. With more than one-thousand administrators at Wikipedia, I don’t see why a non-optimal situation like this should exist?"
If you know of anyone who has interest in this area, please don't hesitate to send them my way. Adios: --[[User:Sadi Carnot|Sadi Carnot]] 14:16, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
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