User:Quarl/Mergism

Mergism

An encyclopedia needs top-down structure. Articles should start at big concepts, and factor out to subarticles when subsections grow large. However, the natural wiki style is bottom-up. Because new users tend to start stubby articles on minor subjects, experienced Wikipedians need perform the harder task of re-organizing, by merging and refactoring. I like to call myself a mergist Wikipedian.

Articles, not stubs

Related concepts should be covered in one article instead of multiple stubs. Separate articles on closely-related topics always fall into redundancy, inconsistency, and even contradiction. A long article with subsections stays on topic and is easy to read, compared to a bunch of stubs that link to each other and all repeat each other. Even if one of the subtopics is too long, there should be a parent article that has summary sections for each child article.

A group of stubs and a page linking to them will never be a featured article. A group of stubs is not good for the reader; too much non-linear reading is confusing.

Certain groups of articles are embarassingly mergeable: prototypically, an article on subject X, followed by 5 articles on that are all subtopics of X, each with less than 3 sentences, two of which just explain that it is part of X. (Sometimes one of the subtopics will be longer.) Such embarassingly mergeable groups of articles should be quickly merged on sight.

If a set of closely-related topics are too long to all be merged, one alternative to merging is to create a series. An article series uses a navigation box to clearly show the reader which pages are the lead articles and the relationships between articles.

Focus on one subject

Each article should cover one subject, not multiple unrelated, but superficially similarly named topics. Thus articles should be named unambiguously and the ambiguous names become disambiguation pages. For example, the certification article was once about professional certification, product certification, film certification, RIAA certification, not to mention digital signatures; and yet there were other articles about subtopics of professional certification, RIAA certification, and film certification. The fix in this case was to factor the various concepts named "certification" into their own articles and create a disambiguation page.

Mergism vs Inclusionism/Deletionism

Some people have used the term "Mergism" as a middle-ground on the Inclusionism-Deletionism spectrum. What is important is not some point on the quantitative scale for notability standards. The important thing is structure.

Regarding the Articles for Deletion process, Mergism does render some Inclusionist-Deletionist tussle irrelevant. When the notability of the subject of an article is questioned, an AFD is created to gather consensus. Inclusionists and Deletionists argue over whether the subject is worthy of an article in an encyclopedia. Why does this need to happen? There is no messy "Paragraphs for Deletion" process to gather consensus on removing a particular paragraph from an article. The contents of a single article are the domain where a Wiki shines. It is much easier to balance a single article, keeping the subsections of one article in line with one other. Balancing the entire encyclopedia is hard. Therefore when an article Y is up for AFD because Y is non-notable, if there is a parent topic X to merge to, article Y should be merged to X. The editors of X can decide how much of Y to keep.