Talk:Wales in the Middle Ages

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Duplication

An editor (maybe a couple of them) has simply copy and pasted text from History of Wales to this article and also to the child articles:

I removed some of the duplication in (1) - Wales in the Early Middle Ages[1], but there remains very significant duplication. I have been puzzling about how to resolve this, and think more input is required. Referencing on this article and the child articles is in better shape than in the overall history article. Content is drifting in some places, whilst broadly the same. My questions:

Is this page required? History of Wales divides the Middle Ages into three and links to the child articles above. Merging this page with the history of Wales article would remove a lot of the duplication (not all of it).
If this page is useful, what level of detail should be in each article? As a general principle, the parent articles would summarise the child articles, but with 3 tiers, what goes in the summary of the summary?

If anyone has thoughts, I can initiate merge discussions as appropriate - just would like a feeling for how others see this. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 07:19, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In principle, having articles with this many satellite articles can work, but to add value there needs to be something different. On one level, the narrower the focus of the article the more certain aspects can be delved into. There may also be topics which an article which looks at the entirety of the Middle Ages would be better suited to, where the cut off dates for the finer periodization may make that content more difficult. For example the main article on Wales in the Middle Ages could have a section on the economy, which may be easier to paint on broad strokes. The structure may end up being quite similar, but with very different content and the main article taking a lighter approach to the summary. Done well, it would involve a fair amount of signposting between articles.

All that said, it would take some effort to do and if consensus that a single page about medieval Wales would be easier to maintain I think that would be an entirely reasonable approach. Richard Nevell (talk) 18:14, 27 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]