User:Collect/essay

This is a user essay relating opinions regarding what should be primary considerations in articles.

Reference

An encyclopedia is a reference work, and should not be a copy of the Library of Congress. If a reader desires further information, they should use the references given. Providing huge lists does not aid them in doing research on a topic.

An encyclopedia does not need to have articles on conceivable topic. While the concept of "notability" as currently used has many flaws, it is one means of keeping material which will never likely be used by a reader from the project. Another means of determining utility of an article would be to maintain records of articles which have essentially zero pageviews, and examine the practicality of finding common denominators between them, giving an empiral set of bases for exclusion of articles.

Relevance

Often edit disputes focus on the relevance of a topic to the main subject of the article. Currently the RfC process rarely attracts more than one or two new sets of eyes to the article. Requests for mediation frequently fail to get "unanimous consent" from the editors involved. Clearly a system should be found which reduces the amount of animosity all too often found in talk pages.

Perhaps material which is of questioned relevance should be omitted rather than having lengthy disputes over it. The current system of "consensus" fails far too often, and if the bright line were to favor exclusion of material which is contested, such would occur less often. If the ones proposing the language feel it is important enough, there should be a truly neutral group of editors to give a decision -- avoiding the problem of having discussions on the article talk page getting too heated. This would move the tendency of long discussions on talk pages which achieve no results over to a venue where trusted outsiders would look at the simple facts.

Other disputes center on treatment of material which is more opinion than it is fact -- currently opinions can be put in articles freely if they are marked as opinions. Almost invariably, others pop in with opinions from entirely different sources.

In such cases perhaps the material which is not palpable fact should be avoided from the start. In an effort to achieve a neutral point of view often the article gets overloaded with extraneous material which is of more interest to the editors than it ever will be to the reader. This would also largely avert "Conflict of Interest" questions. "COI" is sometimes used as a means of preventing a person who has legitimate ability to contribute to an article from doing so. When WP was young, the fear was that a person could write a clearly improper article promoting himself, company or organization, but that concern ought to be lessened now. People with a decided COI who are devious are a far worse threat than having a person state that he knows about the subject directly. Combined with the proposal above that a neutral group who have no connection with the article nor with any of the editors of the article be arbiters of content, the concerns of COI would be obviated.

Readable

In some ways this is the most important requirement for any article. Most articles now have dozens of "wikilinks", hundreds of "references" and the like (sometimes even 15 references for a single word.) Very few readers use those footnotes, even though they can take up more than half the article space.

Readers seeing all those superscripts quickly have glazed over eyes. And may smirk when they see the wikilinks to such words as "nation" or "yellow" -- why do we need to insult them by thinking they do not know simple terms?

Adjectives are the chief enemy of readability. Simple sentence construction can make a point far more clearly than long sentences with lots of adjectives.

"NPOV" discussions sometimes lead to excessively long articles. The current system can be likened to a boat listing to one side -- and the solution is to add more ballast to the other side. Then more to the first side and more to the second as no one ever feels exact NPOV has been reached. In the boat example, it will, in fact, sink. The cause of the initial list to one side, rather, should be identified and dealt with. Simply adding unreadable ballast may satisfy word counters who look at length of material on each side, and the number of footnotes on each side, but does not benefit the final consumer, the reader.