Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Modular Articles/Archive 1
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| Archive 1 |
Potential problems seen by DGG
obstacles
The advantages are obvious, so I'll mention a few problems ahead.
- Some of the articles being worked with a controversial, and involve dozens of daily edits, many of them disruptive. If there is a text unit in common in two articles, who gets to change it? To fit in with one article's other changes it may need to be modified one way, and this may not suit the other article. But otherwise they will diverge and no longer be modular. Transclusion only works with agreed-upon text, and requires disciplined and organized editing.
- Organized and orderly editing is entirely foreign to WP. There are always a few people who try to do it for a few months, until they get sufficiently disgusted to leave, or sometimes to become an administrator and worry about other people's projects. If WP were to change, we might be able to keep such people, which would certainly be a good thing. But if WP worked that way many of the horde of anarchic uneducated would leave, and they are what gives the project its life.
- Some of the articles are so controversial, that it seems desirable to keep them away from others. The D. article is very good in many respects, and the E. article has major problems keeping its integrity and seems to have required a constant running fight since WP started, Having worked a little on both, I would like to keep as much of a firewall between them as possible.
solutions
- This is no different to current POV problems. Discussion and consensus. Samsara (talk • contribs) 01:36, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
- There are pages where there will not be consensus. As applied here, consensus is organized by stubborness, and sometimes by mass, and sometimes a small lobby can concentrate on a point.
What does
- See Wikipedia:Expert retention and similar pages. Not sure about the anarchic uneducated being particular useful, assuming that this definition excludes the self-educated and willing-to-learn. Not sure what difference they make to this project. Samsara (talk • contribs) 01:36, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
- Well, I meant it to include those people :). The more of them we can attract--and teach the fundamentals of evidence and logic, and effective writing, the better. Some of the most valuable contributors in some of the topics being discussed right here are --to me--surprisingly young. I am y have been as clever as they when I was 20, but I did not know nearly as much as they.DGG 05:54, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
- The Darwin and Evolution articles are not likely to share summary sections as far as I can tell. Samsara (talk • contribs) 01:36, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Comment
This may be misleading and perhaps a misunderstanding of what I see as a natural consequence of WP:Summary style following on from avoiding excessively long articles: for example, the article Second voyage of HMS Beagle provides a common source of detail for Charles Darwin#Journey on the Beagle, HMS Beagle#Second voyage and The Voyage of the Beagle, but in each of these articles the "summary" is rightly completely different: the first picks out aspects important to Darwin's biography, the second gives details of the ship, and the third points to the journey article as describing what's in the book. To me, it's important that the summary sections are adapted to the individual main articles, while the detailed articles form common modules that can be modified or added to as required. Of course there's nothing wrong with copying a summary section to another article, but that's as a starting point for specific adaptions rather than as an unchangeable standard module. .. dave souza, talk 10:09, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
- 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? Samsara (talk • 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. DGG 05:54, 30 November 2006 (UTC)