If you try making the article more succinct, Carcharoth, you may well find editors reverting you and claiming that you are "deleting reliably sourced material" and censoring what you don't like. What policy would you cite in response?
In a way that is a new problem. Most of our policies are arguably still biased against such deletions, reflecting a time when many articles were stubs and we were glad to have any material at all. We have no policy or guideline arguing for succinctness (except the COATRACK essay perhaps). People are traditionally free to write as much as they like about anything that has taken their fancy. We have an incredibly detailed article on toilet paper orientation and other obscure subjects that would never make it into a regular encyclopedia. "Due weight" only applies to subtopics within an article, not to notable topics as such. If the bulk of something is cut in an article, you just go and create a sub-article, pointing to the 100 sources that have written about it, and create an 8,000-word article about "tail", while "dog" remains at 500 words. The trouble is, this in-depth coverage of obscure topics is also part of what people like about Wikipedia. That it can be and is abused for activism, just by sheer weight of coverage, is obvious. I just don't see an easy solution. We have no policy that an editor must not use every last source available, and I don't think instituting one is feasible. A. --- On Sat, 4/6/11, Carcharoth <[email protected]> wrote:From: Carcharoth <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] BLP extension suggestion To: "English Wikipedia" <[email protected]> Date: Saturday, 4 June, 2011, 23:57 On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 6:51 PM, David Levy <[email protected]> wrote: > I see no material distinction preventing us from documenting the > matter in a balanced fashion. The trouble is, the article is overwritten. This is not a phenomenon restricted to this article, it is common in many "political" or "activist" articles, where some editors try to use *every* source out there to write an article several pages long (sometimes in an attempt to avoid arguments about what to include and what not to include, at other times maybe just by being carried away, or simply by not wanting or knowing how to exercise judgment on what to include and when less is more). I repeat, a shorter article (if done to high standards) would be *just as balanced* and would send the message that this is not a topic that really needs lots written about it. One of the fundamental elements of editorial judgment is to decide what to leave out and how to *summarise* parts of the topic rather than drawing in everything that has been written about the topic. You see many FA-level articles where the main writer has read numerous sources and made a judgment (based on the proportions of coverage given by the main source) on where and how to summarize. That needs doing here. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
