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Archive 1Archive 2

Tone

I like the point that this article makes a lot, but it's a bit on the dry and awkward side. Is there any way it could be punched up a bit? Possibly by leading off with some examples, and cutting a little of the exposition? -- Doom 19:21, Jul 19, 2004 (UTC)

Proposal to consolidate advice on writing better articles

At present there are many articles in the Wikipedia namespace that seek to give guidance on how to write better articles. I propose consolidating these into a much smaller number. On User:Jongarrettuk/Better writing guide I propose how these could be consolidated. The proposal is not to change advice, just to consolidate it. If I have inadvertently moved what you consider to be good advice that is currently in the Wikipedia namespace, please re-add it. I'm hope that the proposal to merge all these articles, in principle, will be welcomed. Of course, it may be preferred to have 2, 3 or 4 inter-connected articles than just one and would welcome advice on how this could be done. (In particular, perhaps all the guidance on layout should be spun off into one consolidated article on layout.) I'm also aware that putting lots of different bits of advice together may throw up anomalies or bits that people now disagree with (including bits that I myself disagree with:) ). I ask for support for the consolidation. Once the consolidation has happened, the advice can be changed in the normal way. Please feel free to improve on the current draft consolidation, but don't remove or add advice that is not currently on the Wikipedia namespace. If all goes well, I'll add a new Wikipedia:Guide to writing better articles page on the 19th, though maybe some bits of the new article will need to be phased in over a longer period. I'll also take care to preserve all the archived discussion in one place. jguk 19:58, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

A centralized good writing guide is a good thing. But please leave the detailed pages (such as this one) and summarize points in the central writing guide. --mav 22:17, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Disagreement concerning the mass blanking and redirects is part of a request for arbitration I have made. Maurreen 14:47, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

A challenge for summary style

I've noticed a few pages where summary style had led to problems (or been misapplied, if you like). It might be worth putting some comments here on how to solve/avoid these problems.

Nuclear weapon includes big sections on the effects of a nuclear weapon and on the design of a nuclear weapon. Both are more extensively covered in other articles (nuclear explosion and nuclear weapon design). Here the sections in the original article are huge (not quite as big as the specialized article) with many subsections. As a result, they receive a lot of editing.

Syria includes a section on the politics of Syria; there's also a Politics of Syria article. Unfortunately, the Politics of Syria article looks like a simple copy of some old version of the main article, with some tabular data pasted in the end. I think people are almost certainly editing the Syria article instead.

So how should this sort of thing be prevented/fixed? The danger, I think, is that people edit and expand the summary, rather than the full article. --Andrew 14:28, May 2, 2005 (UTC)

Montreal and History of Montreal have the same problem (but worse). --Andrew 04:49, May 5, 2005 (UTC)

If you see that, then summarize the section and expand the daughter article. Then leave an HTML comment in the section telling editors to direct expansion to the daughter article. --mav 22:15, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
I went ahead and did this for the Montreal articles. Will look at the Syria articles later. --mav

templates to make summary style explicit

I would like to start a discussion on the use of templates to make explicit the relationship between an article and its summary in another article. I believe this also addresses the above problem. Currently summaries are often marked by the template {main} (or {seemain}). The original intent was for the other template to go on the article. This way it is clear that information should be coordinated between these articles (for editors) and that additional detailed or background information is available (for readers). Because {main} and {seemain} were identically worded they were supposed to be the same and usually only the summary was marked with either one of them. To remedy this I proposed and created two new templates {{subarticleof}} and {{seesubarticle}}. Recently all four of these were nominated for deletion Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/Not_deleted/July_2005#Template:Subarticleof and Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/Not_deleted/July_2005#Template:Main / Template:Seemain. Some people have expressed concern about the word "subarticle" so the following wording might be more appropriate:

  • {details}: For more details on this topic, see the article {1}.
  • {background}: For more background on this topic, see the article {1}.

Please comment on appropriateness/desirability of using templates to indicate the summary/detailed article relation and the wording and naming of such templates. --MarSch 10:38, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

I think that the templates are too general, so they don't really fit with the "flow" of an article. It seems better for someone to just link to a subject within a sentence rather than stop what is being said to have the subarticle link there. For example (and I have no idea how this just came to my mind), if you were editing the article on Cheese and wanted to say something about Cheddar, a sentence saying, "Cheddar is one of the most popular cheeses in the world." can continue on much better than "Cheddar is one of the most popular cheeses in the world. For a more detailed treatment of this topic, see the subarticle [[{{{1}}}]]." Because of what this does to the article, I agree that the templates should be deleted - not because of any naming problems, but because they just aren't necessary. Vyran 14:19, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
I think that you're right that such a use of the template would be unneeded and disrupt the flow of the article, but that's not how the templates are (should be?) used. See for example, China, which has "main articles" for terminology, climate, demographics, etc. and a whole bunch for history. Since they're at the top of each section, they don't disrupt the flow and because they're separated, they're easier for the interested reader to find than a link to history of China would be if it were buried in the section.
Incidentally, the distinction between background and details seems like a good one to me. Dave (talk) 16:23, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
Often what is summarized in one article is merely an aspect which is more thoroughly covered elsewhere. It is not uncommon to have 1–3 paragraphs which summarize something, and I often find such templates useful in providing a link to an article with details relevant to all those paragraphs without distracting from the text flow. For example, in Cheese there is brief mention of colors of cheese and it is not hard to imagine there being a little more material about cheese colors, which might be covered in much more detail in Coloring in the food industry. Some styles would try to weave in a suitable word or phrase to link to Coloring in the food industry, while other editors would use styles such as these templates create. A difficulty is that the linked article may indeed have a lot of information relevant to cheese, cheese industry, cheese politics, and other topics which directly bear on cheese colors, there is no simple major/minor or summary/detail relationship between the two articles, other than their being co-articles on the topic of colors of cheese. We're dealing with many concepts and not always simple relationships between them. (SEWilco 03:41, 18 July 2005 (UTC))
  • I don't see any objections, besides some old and seemingly uncorrectable misinterpretations. I'm going to implement my suggestions in a few days. --MarSch 09:05, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
    • People may be not objecting if these "uncorrectable misinterpretations" have already raised their own objections, thus you can not ignore them. Whatever it is which you refer to. (SEWilco 20:20, 14 August 2005 (UTC))
    • You should correct these "uncorrectable misinterpretations", otherwise new users who make the same misinterpretations will be misusing the templates. (SEWilco 20:20, 14 August 2005 (UTC))
  • I'm not sure these templates would correct the problems that you mention--people would probably still edit the summary and ignore the larger article--but these templates might be useful to have. I'd support them as long as no move was made to have them replace templates {main} (or {seemain}). Then if people find the new templates useful, they would be adopted over time.--Alabamaboy 12:14, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
    • Sorry, I seem to have confused some comment elsewhere. I was too lazy to read everything again to check. Still that leaves no objections. Alabamaboy: I would have these templates replace the uses of {main} in summary style. All other uses of {main}, whatever those may be, can be examined afterwards. Touching {main} is however a usefull way of alerting people. I've tried to get people to this discussion by posting in all talk pages of the featured article procedure, talk of {main} and all related and also VP, but response is still low. Oh, I forget the TfD. That is pretty much every place I can think of that is relevant. Do you have any ideas how to involve some more people? The wiki way is to go ahead until you meet resistence. Then discuss. If we're all in agreement then we should go ahead again until people notice. Oh, one other way might be to include a link in {main} to this discussion, but I'm loath to do that.--MarSch 14:49, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Objections

"I was too lazy to read everything again to check. Still that leaves no objections."

  • You're saying you are not reading everything.
  • Despite admitting that, you claim there are no objections.
  • How do you know there are no objections if you are not looking for them? (SEWilco 15:44, 16 August 2005 (UTC))

"I don't see any objections, besides some old and seemingly uncorrectable misinterpretations."

  • If you're not correcting the objections, they are objections despite being old.
  • If something is being misinterpreted, explain better what is being misinterpreted so it will not be misinterpreted by future users. (SEWilco 15:44, 16 August 2005 (UTC))

"I'm going to implement my suggestions in a few days."

    • I'm not admitting to not reading everything. I had read everything, then when I checked a few weeks later I scanned everything to refresh my memory and all that happened is that I thought that something written elsewhere was written here. My suggestion as explained above is to specify that the templates {details} and {background} should be used for summary style and possibly only for summary style. I think it would be good to have templates for doing this. So if there are no objections I'm changing the project page to reflect this change. I would really appreciate some feedback however before I do this. --MarSch 15:27, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

How to determine size for summary style

The opening paragraph says "generally 30KB of prose" is the limit. So what I'm wondering is what counts as prose? Some articles have extensive references, large tables, or lots of external URLs, all of which can bloat the article text size without adding much to the "prose" that a reader is expected to read. Is the intent of that statement to focus on the prose in the article, and not the actual text size of the article? This would mean not relying pedantically on the size warning, but rather focusing on the readable size. I think that would be the correct interpretation, and I'd like to change the wording to more clearly express this view, but I want to get input before making changes. – Doug Bell talk•contrib 12:49, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Summary style#Size, which links to Wikipedia:Article size. On that page there is, among other things: ">30KB - May eventually need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size; this is less critical for lists)".
Whatever the improvement you propose, I think consistency with Wikipedia:Article size would best be persued. If you feel that that page might benefit from updating, best to discuss at Wikipedia talk:Article size. --Francis Schonken 13:28, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I got to here from Wikipedia:Article size, but I was considering raising the same issue there. Since the technical issues behind the size are, I believe, largely a moot point now, I was looking for where to discuss article size from a style perspective. Neither this page nor the size page addresses the issue between the physical size and displayed size of the article. So maybe tomorrow I'll raise the issue at the size page, but I'm still looking for input on whether the style issue (summary pages style) should be base the size on a measure of readable size instead of physical size. – Doug Bell talk•contrib 13:48, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
"Interwiki links, along with external links, further reading, references, see also and similar sections should not be counted toward an article's total size since the point is to limit readable prose in the main body of an article." In short, you are correct Doug. -- mav 18:46, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

30kb of prose

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Summary_style

For people not familiar with computer technology this is maybe confusing. Should we add something like: "(roughly ... letters/words)" or make a link to a related article ?—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.58.137.154 (talk • contribs) .

People are made aware of this through the warning which appears at the top of the page when you attempt to edit a page bigger than 30k, although whether that applies when editing sections I can't remember. It's a good point though, and someone must know what 30k of text equates to, roughly. I'll post a note on WP:VPT. Hiding Talk 19:27, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
  • It appears that roughly 4700-4800 words will be about right, based on a very small pool of two examples. Letter wise, you're talking 30 000, pretty much, I think a character equals a byte. Hiding Talk 20:46, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Reference to POV forking

Cut:

"Summary style" is a technique that is recommended to avoid POV splitting of articles, see: wikipedia:content forking#Article spinouts - "Summary style" articles.

This has nothing to do with Wikipedia:POV fork. A POV fork is an article (or article section) which is biased. The 'fork' asserts one point of view as being correct, instead of describing all points of view without labelling one "true" or "right".

Many articles are so long or contentious, that summarizing the disputed subtopic briefly and splitting out the subtopic into a separated (but linked) article can stop an edit war. The separation facilitates facilitates neutral description of the both subtopic and main topic.

There are some POV pushers at Wikipedia, however, and they frequently and adamantly resist any break up of their 'consensus' versions of biased articles. They use reverts to deter any additional contributors from editing these articles, which is IMHO violates Wikipedia:Gaming the system. Splitting off a contentious aspect of a topic makes it easier to describe it neutrally, provided a neutral summary is left behind in the paret article. --Uncle Ed 18:32, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

"Many articles are so long or contentious, that summarizing the disputed subtopic briefly and splitting out the subtopic into a separated (but linked) article can stop an edit war. The separation facilitates facilitates neutral description of the both subtopic and main topic." Um, what part of Wikipedia does not view article forking as an acceptable solution to disagreements between contributors is not clear to you? You've been trying to use that same old tired and bogus justification for justifying POV forks for months now Ed. In the view of many to push your own POV from what I've seen. So what make you think that accusing others being "POV pushers" will get you anywhere along with that reasoning? FeloniousMonk 22:01, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

It's not a POV fork, if the spinoff article is neutral, and if a neutral summary of the controversy is left behind. I just made a spinoff of Mel Gibson, with User:Friday's blessing (see Mel Gibson DUI incident). Although I did not make it just to prove a point, it does provide a good example of what I'm talking about.

I oppose the creation of POV forks. I support legitimate, neutral spinoffs only. If an article I've created in any way violates NPOV guidelines, please explain why. Here, I make it easy for you: show how it exalted one point of view over another; or asserted that one POV was 'true' and that another was 'false'; or concealed the existence of a real-world dispute (outside of Wikipedia) on a controversial issue. Any of these would clearly violate Wikipedia:Content forking. --Uncle Ed 17:16, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Your history tells a different story. It's an easily verified fact that far, far more of your personal spin-off articles have been deleted from Wikipedia through WP:AFD] for being POV-forks than those that remain as acceptable content forks. So forgive me and the many others who doubt your opinion as to what constitutes a legitimate content fork here. FeloniousMonk 21:14, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, since you give no examples to support your wild claim, I'll have to take the burden of proof on myself. Here are a few spin-off articles I've been involved with lately. Let all judge for themselves whether the results abided by or violated NPOV:

What does everyone think of these? --Uncle Ed 14:49, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

SubArticle template

Please note I changed the guideline to include inserted the new SubArticle template. Any thoughts? --Ephilei 00:54, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I removed it, I don't think this a good idea. --Francis Schonken 07:03, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
But there is definitely a need to ensure co-ordinated editing between a summary section and the subarticle that was spun off into its own article. This type of template would ensure that this would happen. Or at least remind more conscientious editors that there are two places that may need updating/changing. The subarticle and the summary back in the main article. The "synch" template can be used if things are out of synch, but there should be permanent links between the summary section and the subarticle expanding that summary. Carcharoth 22:47, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Style?

Is this concept (and the "Sync" template) supposed to mean that summary sections and the full articles they link to should share the same writing style and wording? What I mean to say is, should summary sections be derived directly from the full article, or is it alright to simply present accurate information in a different style and manner? Is the summary section a direct quoted excerpt from the full article, or is it written separately, using different wording, style, and organization, but containing nevertheless the accurate and relevant information? Am I being clear? LordAmeth 22:47, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

The summary section and the daughter article expanding on that summary section should always be synchronised, with everything in the summary mentioned in the expanded section. There is no need to directly quote. You can paraphrase things instead. But it is important in the summary to accurately present the overall balance of the information in the daughter article. I believe the summary section should be subservient to the daughter article, and should be rewritten as the daughter article grows and changes. One possibility is to use the lead section of the daughter article, but there will be differences. The lead section of the daughter article needs to cater for the reader who comes to that article from somewhere else, rather than from the parent article (though a hatnote directing people "upwards" to the parent article helps). The summary section back in the parent article needs to be written for the reader of that article, so it might be written slightly differently to fit into the flow of the article. Also, the reader who reads the summary section, and only then goes to the daughter article, will have to mentally adjust as they realise they can probably skip past the lead section and go straight into the main part of the daughter article. Carcharoth 11:04, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
All well said. But the summary in the parent article should be significantly larger than the lead section of the daughter article. The lead section is supposed to give a quick summary of the article while the summary in the parent article needs to go into a bit more detail, but not nearly as much detail as the body of the daughter article. So yeah, readers should be able to skip the lead section of the daughter article. --mav 00:16, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

The Valley

I'm not sure what to do here. There is a whole paragraph that is far too long explaining about an area of The Bronx called The Valley. It deserves really its own article or should be shortened as it does not belong on that page. Btw The Valley is meant to be a disambiguation page. I also do not know about areas of the Bronx as i'm not from the US. Simply south 10:48, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:How to break up a page - redirects here

I recently discovered that Wikipedia:How to break up a page redirects here. The talk page was left behind, and should be moved somewhere or linked from here, so the discussion there doesn't get lost. Also, I found that page useful for cases when a page is broken up completely, prior to a redirect being implemented. The 'Summary style' page assumes that a parent article is always left behind, but there are cases where badly designed articles are best managed by splitting the sections off and merging to different articles, and leaving the original title as: (a) a redirect to one of those pages, and (b) a repository for the edit history of the content merged elsewhere. So in effect, breaking up a page has a wider meaning than just the one covered here, and spinning off new pages in this 'summary style' is just one example of why breaking up a page might be needed. So I propose to resurrect Wikipedia:How to break up a page to cover all this. Does that sound OK? Carcharoth 13:51, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Looking at the page when it was merged, it is clear that the page never covered the case you refer to in the first place, and had almost no original content of its own, nor was it even a true "How-to" guide (compare the explanations at Wikipedia:Footnotes or Wikipedia:Did you know/Guide). As is, I see little material on the talk page that needs salvaging, and the redirect is still available for use would someone want to take the time to actually write a guideline. Circeus 14:13, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
You are right, it didn't cover that case. Sorry if I implied that. Just wanted to check you didn't mind someone (maybe me if I have time) writing up a guideline there. Carcharoth 14:44, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
No problem, just make sure to properly link and and respect the various guidelines that apply,and make it an actual how-to (otherwise, it'll just be a fork). Circeus 15:53, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

"main"

The word "Main"is being used in WP in two opposite meanings.

  1. The stem article, the one that provides a summary of the more specific articles
  2. For the link to the detailed articles, , for the main article in this subject,

when it should be For details on .... There are probably hundreds of articles in WP doing it wrong. I'm not sure what can be done about it except changing them all, for I do not immediately see how a bot could distinguish. It might help to have some clear statement of this at the top of this page to refer to, or --better yet--a template to put on the talk pages explaining the change.DGG 18:00, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

It's been discussed before that the first sense is a completely inappropriate use of the {{main}} template. "Overview article" is a far better term for that sense. Circeus 20:02, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree with you. "main" is obviously ambiguous, though we may not agree exactly on where it should be used. Should the template be changed? or added? DGG 22:47, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Guideline in a nutshell

The "nutshell" summary of this guideline says that "When articles grow too long, longer sections should be spun off into their own articles and a several paragraph summary should be left in its place." Shouldn't that be "a several sentence summary"? The section that was split out was probably several paragraphs long, and one would hope that the summary could be shorter. --David Cohen 17:58, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Usually, no. Might unbalance the article where you're splitting from. --Francis Schonken 19:01, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Well, assuming it's a good summary that doesn't change the thrust of the original (and of course isn't a POV fork), I guess the length of the summary depends on the amount of material that's being split out. The guideline does state that "The summary in a section at the survey article will necessarily be at least twice as long as the lead section in the daughter article." That sounds like fair guidance, considering the recommendations on lead section length (1-4 paragraphs). Thanks. --David Cohen 23:49, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Notability

How does this apply to stuff that's "notable enough for a section, not enough for an article" where either the material to be split is too long or too numerous (in terms of how many sections) to be fully described in the larger article? I've seen discontent on this point in AFDs. --Random832(tc) 07:11, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

a shame no one answered your question... my opinion is that since these are both guidelines (and especially becuase WP:N is a newer guideline) one doesn't trump the other as people often like to think they do. instead they work in tandem whenever possible ("non-notable stub") and you use common sense to apply the more relevant one in a deletion debate. in most cases a non-notable subtopic won't have enough information to justify splitting it off from it's notabel parent-topic, but this isn't always the case (the various Pokemon and Simpsons episodes would never really pass WP:N). -PokeZap (Zappernapper) 20:40, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Copied vs. Moved

I disagree with this change [1], which I think goes against WP philosophy, and would only serve to embolden contentious editing, and the removal of new material as a presumption. If anything, I think material should be copied, if appropriate, and the respective sections edited, if appropriate. Mackan79 16:37, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

It's only logical that a summary must summarize the entire work, and therefore cannot contain unique material. Moreover, one cannot properly summarize material unless one sees it all in context. This is just common sense, and mirrors what is said in WP:LEAD; a lede is a summary for an article in the same way as a summary section is. Jayjg (talk) 21:57, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
I think there are reasons why a section in one article might want to stress material differently from a general article on that topic. A lead is very different, where you're dealing with a single page. Moving material in a page is one thing, but removing any new material from a "summary section" to the "main article" as a matter of policy strikes me as overly restrictive. This could be used to place the onus on an individual bringing in material that he first go edit the "main article" before making any changes. I don't think that's appropriate or necessary. Asking that material be copied, and then adjusted, seems to me the wikier way of doing it, than requiring that the material be "moved" (read: deleted). If a specific addition needs to be deleted, plenty of policies handle that. Mackan79 23:04, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Why would a summary not want to accurately reflect the main article? That's a very strange assertion. Jayjg (talk) 23:15, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
Well, for one, I'm not sure it's always clear what is simply a summary and what's not. In many cases, though, I think a summary might want to tie the broader subject in with the topic of that article. For a silly example, in an article about a hamburger, you might have sections devoted to each component. The section on the lettuce, then, wouldn't simply be a summary of lettuce; it would discuss lettuce as it relates to hamburgers. Without looking around, I'd think this could be the case in many instances, to varying degrees. In any case, I simply think "copied" is a nicer way of saying it, which fully allows that material would also be removed under specific policies. Mackan79 00:20, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
I'm still thinking that maybe a more strict wording is still a good idea. I wonder if the kind of situation you describe above really is a case of WP:SS, it seems more like a related article, where a {{see also}} link might be appropriate. Perhaps this guideline should focus on the case of real subarticles, where recommending stricter synchronization is a good idea. --Merzul 01:29, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Alright, well see my concern below. I just would rather the policy not be phrased to suggest that material should be "moved" as a presumption, since "moved" effectively means "deleted." The possible sentence we could add to make it stronger, then, could be that material in a summary section should always appear in the main article. As I said above, though, this actually strikes me as somewhat problematic, due to the incremental way WP tends to be improved, and because "always" is an awfully strong word. Unfortunately, I think that probably has to make synchronization a serious ongoing task, which probably can't be solved so simply. If you'd like to see the extended context of this discussion, incidentally, it's here. Mackan79 01:58, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Ok, I will out of curiosity look into the context, but you have already convinced me! Thank you for your patience in explaining, I'm a bit stubborn and get over-excited about things that don't actually solve the real problem, but my intentions were sincere :) Thanks. --Merzul 02:20, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Material should be moved because the summary has to summarize the main article, not just repeat whatever was most recently added. Copying would give undue weight to the most recent material, and inevitably unbalance the summary. Jayjg (talk) 03:37, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Yes, this was a very important argument, but could I humbly suggest that we ask for a third opinion? I'm too inexperienced and, frankly, both of you are too persuasive. I think a third opinion is very important when there is a complicated content dispute behind this. --Merzul 04:19, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for listening, Merzul, I appreciate it. Jay, you're simply assuming something which isn't necessarily true, which isn't a good way to make policy. First, copying does not create undue weight; it simply doesn't presume to fix issues of undue weight, which should be dealt with directly by the undue weight policy. Ironically, through our entire disagreement, I've been trying to get you to argue under the undue weight standard, but you have refused, trying to rely exclusively on this policy instead. This is exactly the problem. Second, what you are suggesting will create many arguments as to what is strictly a summary and what isn't. It will also lead to contentious editing, as people will simply delete material and tell the contributor to go add it to the main article first, which the average editor will not likely care to do (read another entire article, see how it is put together, see how to best implement a particular single sentence or single point there so that a change can be made to the summary). Of course, this is exactly what you have just tried to do also, and are now trying to turn into a matter of policy. I think we should leave this policy the way it was, which was fine, harmonious, addressed the issue of synchronization, but did not give an implicit authorization to simply delete specific material without another reason. Mackan79 14:27, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Just about everything leads to "contentious editing" on hot topics, moving isn't deleting, summaries should summarize an entire article in context, not give undue weight to the entries of the most recent editors. Jayjg (talk) 16:03, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Except that my concern isn't hypothetical; the fact is you rewrote this in the middle of a content dispute to support your insistence that I rewrite one article to edit another. Thus you've tried to create a presumption that material should be moved, which will only allow future wikilawyers to make themselves more of a nuisance. At the same time, you've provided no support for the change, other than through a second presumption that people will add material to summary sections by accident, and consequently that we should start by reverting them until some undisclosed further time. You're not hurting me with this edit, but you're definitely throwing another kink in WP. Mackan79 23:33, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
The application of "summary style articles" guidelines is quite specific and it was designed to avoid POV forks. We should endeavor not to allow such forks, as to minimize undue weight and keep our articles well balanced. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 22:06, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
I agree with this; I also believe the intent was that critical material not simply be removed from articles without summarizing it in its previous place, however. The transformation of this into stating that "summary sections" then may not be altered before without rewriting the general article on that subject strikes me as a large jump away from that intent, and unfortunate. Mackan79 23:33, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Agreed. For a summary to be a summary, it has to summarize the complete article. Otherwise, so-called summaries will end up as POV forks. SlimVirgin (talk) 22:08, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
So you're really saying any material added to a "summary" section should be deleted pending a rewrite of the larger article on that general topic, then followed by some kind of formal evaluation of whether the material is appropriate? The problem with Jay's proposal is that it doesn't actually change the policy, but simply sets up a series of hoops that one editor will think he can force another to jump through before reaching the same ultimate decision: "does this belong here"? I'd say we should avoid writing policies in such a manner. Mackan79 23:19, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
I think it closes a loophole that some editors might have used to create POV forks. SlimVirgin (talk) 23:40, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
A loophole? By stating that new material should be copied rather than moved? If you can explain that argument, I think you win a prize. Mackan79 00:24, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

The edit seems so sensible and uncontentious I just do not understand any objections. Summaries of linked articles are just that: summaries ... of ... linked articles (henceforth article A). If one can change a summary in article B and just copy the change to the main article, article A, then the tail is wagging the dog. The appropriate place to work on the topic of Article A is in Article A, not other articles. Editors working on article A should have a chance to review the change and if they deem it appropriate delete it, reword it, or expand it. Only when it is certain that the new edit is relatively stable should it be accounted for in summaries of the article. This only makes sense. If new material is added to a summary and only copied rather than moved to article A, there is a real danger that people working on article A will rewrite or reject the new material in article A without removing it from article B. This is the path to real contention and confusion. Note: I and others are speaking 'only of the summaries of other articles. The issue of adding contextual material appropriate to article B is another matter. Slrubenstein | Talk 12:27, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

When editing the article containing the summary, it's obvious (to experienced and observant Wikipedian editors) that it's a summary, because it says "Main article..." at the top. When editing the main article, is there anything to make it obvious that there is a summary somewhere else that needs to be kept updated? Might there be more than one such summary (e.g. lettuce as it related to hamburgers, lettuce as it related to salads, etc.) that need to be kept in sync with the main article?
Rather than "copied" or "moved", the policy could state that the material needs to be reworked to fit summary style (i.e. that the two pages need to be synced somehow). Perhaps usually this would mean putting the new material on the main article page, and replacing it with a summary of itself on the summary page. In some cases, it could mean finding more related information and adding it to the main article page so that the new edit is a summary (if the new information is sufficiently important to warrant the emphasis). There could be other solutions.
I don't see one article or the other as controlling the content of the other article. As long as one is an accurate summary of the other, it doesn't matter which one was written first. It's a reasonable technique to begin with the summary and expand it into a full main article -- or vice versa. --Coppertwig 17:20, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I think that's exactly the issue: the order and relationship between these articles is simply nowhere near as uniform as is being presumed here. I was just looking through the Sweden article, which contained a jumble of "main articles," "see alsos," "for more information sees," etc. In fact, nearly every single section had such a link. So the idea here is that to clean up Sweden, I first have to go write the individual articles on each of those sections, many of which are in significantly worse states of repair? Never mind the fact that which tag had been placed where seemed to be almost entirely arbitrary.
Of course, it's one thing to say it would be nice if people would do that; it would be nice if I would go and write individual articles on each aspect of Sweden (although even then, I have no idea why I should do that first before editing the Sweden article; I'd think getting Sweden in order would be the first step). But to require this? Mackan79 00:59, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Jayjg, please don't claim concensus where there isn't.[2] Are you saying a person should always move new material from a "summary section", and never simply copy it and edit it as appropriate? I'd like to acknowledge that deleting new material in a summary section is not always the right answer. Also, did you consider Coppertwig's suggestion that people may appropriately want to build a section in its larger context before trying to write or rewrite the independent article on that subject?

If you look at User:Jimbo_Wales/Statement_of_principles, number 3 states "'You can edit this page right now' is a core guiding check on everything that we do. We must respect this principle as sacred." Consistent with that principle, if you look at WP:Cite, it makes clear "If you don't know how to format the citation, provide as much information as you can, and others may fix it for you. Cite It!" Could we not do better to respect that principle here? Mackan79 04:36, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

If you want to edit an article do so right now. But make sure you are editing the correct article. I see no good reason to edit summaries of other articles for contents (rather than style) unless it is to more fully represent the main article. Mackan79, what you are suggesting is merely a way to side-step and subvert thw whole collaborative nature of Wikipedia. Let's say there is a paragraph in the Evolution article on "genes" linked the the genes article. There are a number of people who actively edit the genes article because they are up-to-date on the science of genes. Some of them may not ever look at the evolution article. If you edit the summary of the genes article in the evolution article, you are evading the review of the people working on "genes." And if you copy it (rather than move it) to the Genes article, this is what will happen: within a few weeks someone may edit or even remove the edit to the Genes article, and the summary in Evolution will remain untouched. The result? first, the summary is no longer a real summary. Second, it contains possibly false information. It seems to me that your wish to work on edits to an article summary and then export that work to the main article is a huge demonstration of bad faith, bad faith in the editors working on the main article. Mackan79, I want to take you at good faith. Please, please can you explain why you are fighting so hard for this? I really cannot come up with a good or good faith reason though I hope you have one. Jimbo is clearly saying (for example) if you want to edit the article on evoulution, edit the article on evolution. But do not edit the summary of the Gene article (except for style that is fine), if you want to work on the Gene article, damnit, just go to the Gene article and work on that! No one is stopping anyone from editing. We just want to collaborate (meaning: work with others) onj creating a high quality encyclopedia. Slrubenstein | Talk 10:29, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
It appears quite clear that this discussion has not ended. I am putting this note on here to indicate that this edit to a stable version continues to be problematic[3] and certainly not consensus. Further discussion will be required. Hornplease 08:56, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm very glad that this has been brought up, as I've been posting everywhere about a highly related issue. I think Wikipedia is great, but Summary Style is Failing (not an essay)! So I don't think there is a need to say I strongly support Jayjg's edit! While the summary style should slightly contextualize the matter, the current situation on Wikipedia is that there is too often almost no synchronization. So not only is Jayjg's edit highly needed, I think some co-ordinated effort is needed to get things back in sync. --Merzul 00:37, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Oh, actually I'm not sure these two things are related, Jayjg's edit would probably not change the actual situation of synchronization :) I probably need to think before I post! --Merzul 01:05, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
(Ah, I see your update now, but wrote this first): Doesn't copying accomplish the same thing, though? To me the problem is not so much synchronization as it is changing the policy so it can be used to simply delete material for no other reason. I would actually agree with the general need for synchronization across articles; I'd only suggest it's a bit more delicate of a task than simply authorizing the removal of any material that doesn't first come from the "main" article. I think the way the article was written previously encourages synchronization, but in a more artful way, which leaves the question of what specifically to delete to other policies. Mackan79 01:37, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
Sorry for double posting, I see you point, and probably these are two different issues, as maybe yes copying does accomplish this. I understand the concern with abuse, although since this isn't policy, I'm not as worried as you are, but still legitimate concern. In any case, you are probably right that even the current wording does strongly encourage synchronization. I'm just a bit concerned about the current state of affairs, I was essentially distressed with the situation on religion-related pages, but when I wanted an example of this, the first page I visited was the first sub-article of evolution and I found something like a 10 day old copyright violation. It seems sub-pages are just neglected. --Merzul 01:53, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

RfC: Should Guideline Require New Material Be Added to Main Articles Before Summary Sections?

Disagreement focuses on this edit. [4].

In favor: To promote synchronization and avoid POV forks, guideline should require that editors first add material to a main article before adding material to a summary section. Otherwise editors could try editing one while knowing they lacked consensus on the other; also, adding new material to a summary is likely to result in undue weight. Summary sections should be made sure not to contain material not found in the main article.

Opposed: Previous version already says to synchronize, but through a better process. Wiki-theory suggests editors get to edit any part of WP, and should be presumed to have done so intentionally, not required to edit other articles first (such articles may be in disrepair, not of interest, some other problem); bad material should be removed directly under other policies. This change would encourage wikilawyering, create red tape, and prevent the incremental betterment of WP, without greater good.

Previous discussion starts here. 03:00, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

WP:SS isn't stub sorting?

Am I the only one who types in "wp:ss" trying to get to the list of stub types? Xaxafrad 20:22, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Problem at History of the Yosemite area

Note that the example used here, History of the Yosemite area, seems to be under attack from the verifiability zealots [5] ... William M. Connolley 22:30, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm a zealot now. Terrific. The problem is that the article isn't using the summary style. It's simply an article based on original research, albeit fairly competent original research. Still, Wikipedia does not allow it. Why do you bother arguing against such a fundamental policy that is the backbone of Wikipedia? It stands, and shall remain so, that Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. ~ UBeR 03:29, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Example may need to be changed

Too ofen I see people making a mainarticle link and leave the rest of the section empty, or only include one sentence. Perhaps the WWII example should have more than one sentence in each section to demonstrate this more clearly? Any other change that would be good? --GunnarRene 18:41, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Level of desired details

I find the following part of the above section difficult to grasp:

The top or survey article should have general summary information and the more detailed summaries of each subtopic should be in daughter articles and in articles on specific subjects. This can be thought of as layering inverted pyramids where the reader is shown the tip of a pyramid (the lead section) for a topic and within that article any section may have a {{main|<subpage name>}} or similar link to a full article on the topic summarized in that section (see Yosemite National Park#History and History of the Yosemite area for an example using two featured articles).

I am not sure that this adds anything to the overall explanation of summary style, and for me it obscured it somewhat, requiring a certain amount of mental gymnastics and hopping about to the inverted pyramids article to work out what was meant. For me, the pyramid metaphor doesn't quite help in this context. As I understand it, the pyramid style refers to the principle in a newspaper whereby the most important information comes first because many people will never read the whole thing. This doesn't apply to all Wikipedia articles because some are chronological, and important information, for example the execution of Charles I of England or the murder of Abraham Lincoln, may have to come towards the end. The metaphor also fails, for me, because the pyramid method seems to refer to the organisation of information within a single article, whereas we are talking here about a central article with offshoots.

The text above asks us to imagine the layering of inverted pyramids: in my imagination (setting aside the difficulty of layering pyramids, unless they be hollowed out), that would mean the pinnacles of the pyramids pointing downwards. Our advice then goes on to say that the reader is shown "the tip of a pyramid (the lead section)". How so, if the pyramid is inverted? The article on inverted pyramids says "The triangle's broad base at the top of the figure represents the most substantial, interesting, and important information the writer means to convey. The triangle's orientation is meant to illustrate that this kind of material should head the article, while the tapered lower portion illustrates that other material should follow in order of diminishing importance". We seem to be using the pyramid metaphor to say that the central article should show the tips of the pyramids of information, whereas the inverted pyramids page seems says that the base of pyramid represents the most important material.

I am tempted to be bold and cut the pyramid metaphor, since the page explains the matter lucidly enough without the confusion it introduces. Any opinions? qp10qp 13:42, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

In a Nutshell: "the edit summary for the creation of the new article that you write links back to the original article."

I am a little confused about how to follow the instructions on the in a nutshell section. Do you link the edit history simply by adding in the {{main|<name of detailed article>}} template or is there more to it.Badalia 02:53, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

If foo is the old page, then when you create the new page, the first edit summary should be something like "creating daughter article containing material from foo". Christopher Parham (talk) 15:47, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Please make it clear that "summary style" does not trump "do not use subpages"

I have had recent frustrating dealings with a user whose interpretation of summary style is that an article which has been "spun out" from a larger article actually remains "part of the article", just "in a different location in order to conform to the guidelines about how big an article should be for both technical and style reasons." This is pretty obviously a return to the long-discontinued practice of using subpages for spinout articles. This practice was so thoroughly discontinued that not only were the policies written "don't do this" but the facility for subpages in the article namespace was actually shut off in the English Wikipedia. Regardless of this, this user continues to insist that an article which was spun off in order to provide a home for excessive detail added to one section of an article should be forcibly kept as only a more-detailed version of that section -- which is if anything a more "strictly hierarchical" organization of articles than that which the subpages facility in the article namespace was turned off to discourage.

I think this particular user will probably continue to believe his private "part of the article in a different location" no matter what anyone says, but for other users, who actually read the guideline pages they quote, it would probably be a good idea to make clear on theis guideline page that summary style does not override or make exceptions to Wikipedia:Do not use subpages. -- Antaeus Feldspar 21:19, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

That the daughter article should be a "more detailed version" of the relevant section in the article is pretty much exactly what this guideline says. Conversely, the section in the main article is a summary of the most relevant information in the daughter article. Certainly the title should be phrased properly, rather than as "Main/daughter", but otherwise the guideline on subpages has little bearing on the issues discussed here. Christopher Parham (talk) 23:57, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
I think that perhaps you read too fast and skipped past some very important words, namely "forcibly kept as only". If article Foo spins off an article Bar, and the nature of the subject Bar is such that the article Bar never contains anything that isn't relevant to Foo, that's fine and dandy; no one objects to that. But the reason that article titles in the form "Foo/Bar" were disallowed and banned is because people would then write, not the best article about Bar, but the best article about Bar containing only that which is seen as falling under Foo. It doesn't matter that you don't use the title "Foo/Bar" if you enforce the very narrowness that such titles were barred for improperly suggesting were an intended goal. And as it happens, this guy is not only trying to enforce that limitation of scope, he's trying to say that literally, the daughter article should be written as no more than that section of the article, only in more detail. As in, Bar should not be written to be the best article on "Bar", it should be written to be the best article for those who are following the link at the top of Foo#Bar. If Foo happened to wind up sectioned by chronology, then Bar should not contain anything outside that chronology, even if this means re-titling Bar to limit its scope to only that which will smoothly chronologically flow for readers coming from Foo. It's exactly the sort of adapting-the-subject-to-fit-the-articles, rather than vice-versa, that led to Wikipedia:Do not use subpages and thus it needs to be made clearer that merely following Wikipedia:Summary style does not entitle you to violate the other guideline, which is of longer standing. -- Antaeus Feldspar 04:02, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
As I understand the situation you describe, it is one where the daughter article isn't actually a daughter article at all, though it may provide useful supplementary detail to another article. This guideline, as I see it, applies only to, in its own words, "distinct subtopics." Usually an article that is spun out from another article is a distinct subtopic of the larger article, unless the larger article was malformed to begin with. If the content then changes enough that it includes material no longer relevant to the article where it originated, then this guideline wouldn't apply any longer. Christopher Parham (talk) 18:24, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Discussion about particular attribution

I encourage Wikipedians who watch this page to comment about a new proposal at Wikipedia talk:Fringe theories#Appeal to particular attribution. Thanks ScienceApologist 17:28, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Summary section vs. subarticle lead

How should (or should not) summary sections in main articles be synchronized with identical thoughts in lead sections of subarticles? See Talk:Ron Paul#Template, or after archiving, Talk:Ron Paul/archive6#Template. Please pardon my length.

At Ron Paul and Political positions of Ron Paul we have been mulling this guideline over. When I arrived at these two articles there was a very close similarity between the summary section in the main article, Ron Paul, and the lead section of the subarticle. ("Main" means the one written in summary style.) I decided to synchronize the two, because there was heavy reliance on the same 30+ footnotes, which was worth standardizing. There was general agreement with this approach, and the same 4-paragraph text was used for awhile; but editors still would edit one text and not the other, leading to continuation of the minor forking. Then we tried to use first templates and then transclusion (with noinclude) to ensure that the two articles would pull the same text; but the technology for both of these was held to be too complex for editors new and old, and editors in fact just recopied the text over the template or transclusion instead of maintaining it. We then tried the current compromise, which is to retain the 4 paragraphs in the main article, but to shrink the subarticle lead to just two sentences of transition. The justification for that approach was that readers would not want to see the same text twice, since most will only be accessing the subarticle from the main and have presumably just read its summary. Then, of course, someone submitted the subarticle for GA and it was quick-failed, partly on the grounds that the two-sentence lead failed WP:LEAD-- even though a careful consensus had decided that ignoring that rule was a valid approach. In short, there is no solution satisfying everyone.

It appears there will be many article pairs where users will want to synchronize the main article summary and the subarticle lead. (Where users don't want to, of course, the two can fork organically. When there is no conclusion whether or not the two should fork, that can be resolved by ordinary consensus; my question is: when that consensus does favor synchronization, what then?) I believe that in such cases WP:SUMMARY should provide guidance. If the current set of rules were applied strictly, the result would be that synchronization could not be automated, it would always require hand-calibration of one text to the other. That is, when someone adds a helpful footnote to the main article summary, it must be hand-added to the subarticle lead where its text is identical. To me, with the level of technology WP has achieved so far, this solution is highly unwise because the integrity of the linkage between the two articles should be maintained. If someone overhauls one text and not the other, it leads to a misleading fork. Even if someone makes a valid correction to one text and not the other, the misstatement in the other stands until someone catches it a second time-- but someone has already caught it the first time, and WP automation has failed to give that first someone an easy remedy for correcting the misstatement in the second article, other than doing it by hand the second time.

My solution, which will work in enough cases to make it viable to present as an option to editors:

  1. Place noinclude tags around everything in the subarticle except the lead.
  2. Transclude the subarticle into the main article, which will then transclude only the lead.
  3. Add a comment to the subarticle not to change the noinclude tags because of the transclusion.
  4. Add a comment to the main article that edits may be made to the subarticle.
  5. Recommend this process here with a full description, as a viable option for this case.

This method is no more complicated than the process for reporting SSPs, RFCs, or the like. For a related example of this which has worked well for the two primary editors of a different set of articles, see 2008 straw polls, Democratic straw polls, and Republican straw polls.

Advantages:

  • All the benefits of synchronization which accrue to templates (and are widely recognized as very useful in that case); particularly the avoidance of embarrassment when a user sees a stat or fact quoted one way here and contrarily there. If, e.g., one article says Paul has 31,000 YouTube subscribers and the other article simultaneously says he has 32,000 in an otherwise identical sentence, that's unprofessional and easily remedied through a techonology solution.
  • Because the main article summary is a summary, it should be edited with more caution than other nonsummary sections of the main article, or other sections of the subarticle, due to WP:SUMMARY and WP:LEAD. This method requires editors to take the extra step of being sure they want to edit: if a new editor thoughtlessly tries to edit the positions summary in the main article, the editor is presented with a comment instructing that the subarticle be edited instead, forcing reconsideration of whether the edit should appear in the lead (and be transcluded into main) or elsewhere in the subarticle (and not be).
  • If a standardized noinclude method is agreed on by consensus here, it can be recommended to resolve the same problem in a wide variety of articles, such as those cited in the extended discussion linked above.

Disadvantages:

  • Users must learn the method and not mess it up. I regard this as no different from (and much simpler than) many of the other things that must be learned to not mess up at WP, but there was significant concern that with either method (templates or noinclude) the section would be less accessible to new editors and would in fact be scary. (I pointed out that this is a semiprotected article so less accessible anyway, but the objection remained.) This was expressed as barrier to editing, wanting edits to go away, unclear instructions, chasing off editors.
  • When boilerplate text (as opposed to boxed template) appears twice, it may appear unprofessional or boring to a reader. I disagree, believing that reference texts, like most productions, make frequent use of boilerplate and do not bore readers. In fact, it is common for a magazine to reuse an article's first paragraph for its contents-page blurb, and the reader is not offended by having to reread the lead after reading the blurb; I just skip to the second paragraph when I recognize it happening, it's become such a frequent practice.
  • If there were ever any need to transclude the entire subarticle or other subsets of it (I don't imagine any), additional coding would be required in the noinclude tags.

Alternatives (if my approach is not favored):

  • Use templates.
  • Create a new programming technology to handle it better.
  • State that very short subarticle leads are an exception to WP:LEAD (when the subarticle is expected to be reached most often from the main article).
  • Forbid synchronization, require forking and hand maintenance (highly deprecated by me).

Side issue: User:Tvoz, User:Wasted Time R, and I all agree that the recommendation that a main article summary be "at least twice as long" as the subarticle lead is "pulled out of thin air". I would delete "twice" at a minimum, or more directly, explain that subarticle leads may in fact just mirror their main article summaries and need not be content forks as with the Yosemite example. The recommendation "twice" appears to be limited to a small number of articles its author was thinking of at the time, and not applicable to cases like this one.

I would greatly appreciate the community's comments as to a general solution to the problem of simple synchronization. John J. Bulten 19:06, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

This transclusion idea is intriguing, but the more I think about it, the more hairy I think it is. I'm rather technically savvy, but even I get confused when I try to edit a page and find the text I want to change is transcluded. It's just unexpected to find a transclusion in place of text.
More importantly, I suspect most of the time, editors won't want their summary of a linked-to article to be the same as the lead of that article. So this idea is interesting on a technical level, but perhaps not one that will see real-world use.
Still, thanks for inspiring me to educate myself a little more about how transclusion works. ;-) --Father Goose 05:27, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
You're welcome, but I do need an answer to the situation when editors do want to synch these two sections, recognizing that transclusion in place of text is accepted under such conditions (like the similar case of the same introduction appearing in a multipage list). The apparent contradiction is: (1) Don't synch: violates WP:FORK. (2) Shorten one: violates WP:LEAD. (3) Synch: violates WP:SUMMARY. Which guideline should bend? John J. Bulten 05:05, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
I don't get the sense that any of those choices violates any of those guidelines. Unless a subarticle ends up contradicting the main article, I don't see how having the two out of perfect sync is a problem -- and contradictory passages can be resynced anyway.--Father Goose 06:05, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm not satisfied with the response, but am closing the RFC anyway because I have a way to work around it. Can always reopen if this issue recurs. John J. Bulten (talk) 02:14, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Summary style and notability

I don't really want to be the person who brings this up, but someone has to, because it is a genuine issue: what do we do if an article is of sufficient length that our guidelines require us to split it up, but the resulting sub-articles do not pass WP:NOTABILITY in their own right? This has come up several times at AfD; usually, the sub-articles are merged back into the original article, thus raising the length issue again. That seems reasonable to me; in my view, some subjects are simply not notable enough to deserve their own articles, and should only be covered in sections as part of a longer article. What it means, though, is that there is an effective limit on article length; if Summary Style demands that you break an article up into subarticles, but none of your subsections is notable in its own right, then your article is simply too long, and should be cut down. I believe this is actually current policy, but some disagree (and believe sub-articles automatically inherit the notability of their parent), so would like to see it confirmed somewhere in the guidelines. Terraxos (talk) 06:45, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Generally, this means that either a) there is material that shouldn't be there, or b) the section should have been broken into sections of same level instead of split. A subarticle is usually appropriate for a section with many subsections who obviously overshadows the rest of the article. However, such a section should only be split if either the entire article can be reasonably split, or it represents a peculiar topic that is definitely worthy of separate consideration. Circeus (talk) 07:09, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
This is very good point, and one which WP:FICT has tried to deal with in the past. To the best of my own understanding and interpretation, a "non-notable" sub-article can exist in the parent article, but is preferred (for reasons of style and possibly technical reasons) to be a separate document. If, as a section in the parent article, the information isn't excessive then that same logic could be applied to allowing the sub-article to exist as its own page. At least that's my take on it. -- Ned Scott 00:40, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
My interpretation of WP:N is that it applies to all articles. I've also seen this issue at AfD (e.g., currently at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Master Hilarion, where one open question is whether the notability of a minority religion automatically "transfers" to articles on the various gods of that religion). Fireplace (talk) 22:58, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
Yes, we need to add a clear section to this guideline that states:
"Summary articles must adhere to all policies and to the notability guidelines, just like any other articles. If you have a section which is too long to keep in the main article, but which is not a notable subject as a separate article, then instead of spinning it out it should be trimmed down in the main article." Fram (talk) 15:54, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
I disagree with your proposal. First of all, WP:N is not a policy. Second of all, the contents of a section never had to be notable, per WP:NNC. If the section gets too long, it's a natural progression to create a sub-article. The section has to be too long. Not too long *and* just as notable as the main subject of the article. I certainly think that some sections should be trimmed down — not every long section needs to be spunout. But we have to keep in mind browser limitations, internet connection speeds, etc when articles get too long. I don't think the solution is to cut content valuable to readers. The solution is to treat WP:N like the guideline that it is. --Pixelface (talk) 00:02, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

The introduction of this article (which is a pretty poor summary in itself) is very biased towards the anti-notability view. We must remember that anything can be presented in a section of an existing article, expanded, and then split off due to 'size considerations'. Allowing this is basically throwing WP:N out the window. Richard001 (talk) 23:01, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

No one understands this policy -- do something!

For the last week, I tried to explain this WP:SUMMARY policy to editors of the United Nations article without success; they keep expanding a summary section while shunning the main article on the subject. In brief, few people understand this policy and, as a result, WP fills with duplications and contradictions. Please do something. Emmanuelm (talk) 14:19, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

It's not a policy, but the problem is... we can't really do that much about what you describe. WP has always been filled with duplication (no always a bad thing, mind you) and contradiction (more troublesome). Circeus (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 23:45, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
Circeus, the only remedy against contradictions is the removal of duplications and POV forks. I have seen intellectual enemies reach, after days of flames, a consensus. It is a beautiful sight, and it happens only when all editors work together on the same page.
I think that, as WP grows and becomes victim of its own success, this WP:SUMMARY guideline becomes essential. It should be clarified, become policy and be publicized. Emmanuelm (talk) 13:16, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
As far as turning "guideline" in to "policy" goes, Wikipedia:Content forking is probably a more likely candidate than Wikipedia:Summary style imho. The first is a direct corrolary of policy (WP:NPOV for the part that concerns us here, some other parts of it also of Wikipedia:Copyrights), and of the idea that every article should work "stand-alone" for compliance to NPOV and other content guidance. This second idea is rather implicit, but is expressed for instance also in guidance like WP:ASR (that page is currently a bit in a deteriorated state I believe, but the idea is still there). --Francis Schonken (talk) 21:24, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Multi-level hierarchy

I don't understand this idea that the high level summary of an article should appear in a different article from the article it is summarizing.

This article's proposal results in an article's content being spread over multiple articles, resulting in duplicate and inconsistent content in multiple articles. Frequently, the content of an article is summarized in multiple articles making it difficult for the writer of an article to maintain multiple summaries in multiple articles. While it is appropriate for an article to have a summary, there is no need to have multiple summaries of the same content in different places.

A long article should include a summary at its top. While I believe a two level article is usually sufficient, if it is decided that a three, or an N level article is desirable, the appropriate place for all of these summaries is in the main article itself.

The higher level articles rather than summarizing other articles should simply refer to them or synthesize summaries of multiple articles. BradMajors (talk) 04:29, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Brad, WP has a policy about the maximum size of articles. What you are proposing would create humongous articles. I think summary articles are the best solution to manage the growth of WP. Emmanuelm (talk) 17:05, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
Disagree. What I am proposing will decrease the size of content associated with an article. BradMajors (talk) 17:13, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
How could this proposal possibly create humongous articles? For example, small articles should have a summary "lead" paragraph. Rather than other articles writing their own summary of the article, other articles should simply reference the existing summary already in the article. The size is reduced. BradMajors (talk) 17:39, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
Brad, I am confused about what you are offering. I once had this crazy idea where the content of summary articles would be automatically generated out of the lead paragraphs of the main articles -- is this what you mean? Frankly, I am not very optimistic here. I cross-posted this debate in the Village pump but did not get the attention I was hoping. Emmanuelm (talk) 21:00, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
Brad - it would really, really help if you would provide specific examples of where Wikipedia has articles whose summary content you don't like. Also, if you have any examples of a "three-level" article, that would be appreciated. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:09, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Article summary examples: the good, the bad, and the ugly

It is likely better to discuss actual examples of summaries, rather than just in the abstract. Very high level articles like the History of the World should consist solely of summaries of other articles.

BradMajors (talk) 07:34, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Brad, thanks for pointing to this ridiculously over-ambitious article. It illustrates perfectly the absurdity of an Encyclopedia without coherent edition. Please think of possible solutions and mention them in the Wikipedia:Village pump to test their popularity. I'll be reading and may bring (again) my own ideas. Emmanuelm (talk) 14:46, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
I think an article such as "History of the World" should exist, but it should be a type of "portal" where it describes where to find more specific history articles, rather than trying to say summarize a hundred years of history in a sentence or two.
But, we may have changed topics. If we are discussing how to write a summary of an article the discussion belongs here. As the number and length of articles grows, there will be more and more duplication of content between articles - unless there is some attempt made to organize and maintain coherency between articles. The meta topic of how to coherently maintain content among articles, yes belongs elsewhere.
BradMajors (talk) 19:33, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
Brad, you say there will be more and more duplication of content between articles - unless there is some attempt made to organize and maintain coherency between articles. I suggested a few ideas, they went nowhere. Be bold, write yours. Emmanuelm (talk) 15:16, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

How to organize content

At this time, I see Wikipedia as being like a library, a lot of content, but if a reader is looking for information on a subject he will find the information in multiple articles (books) and he will find that the articles (books) contain duplicate and contradictory information. Furthermore, the writer of a article (book) has decided how much content the reader should read on a particular sub-topic. Since Wikipedia is electronic a paradigm shift is necessary.

The only methods I know how content is currently organized on Wikipedia is through categories and through article summaries. (I think ideas on how to organize content other than through main article and summaries is a meta topic which belongs elsewhere.)

Why use main articles and summaries?

  • because an article has become too large and needs to be split,
  • it enables a reader to select for himself how much content he wants to read on a particular sub-topic (i.e. he can either read the summary or he can read the main article, but hopefully not both.),
  • it can be used to avoid duplicate and inconsistent content. If two or more articles have sub-sections on the same topic it would be advantageous to split this common section into a separate article and for each of the referring articles to contain a summary of the content in the main article. Doing so is certainly an improvement, but there is still the problem that the summaries may be inconsistent.

BradMajors (talk) 18:32, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

To give a purposely abstract example, there may be three articles on "cat", "taxidermy", and "coats made from cat fur" in which all of them contain a section on "how to skin a cat". BradMajors (talk) 20:00, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
Our general structure is to do as you recommend -- split complete topics into their own articles and leave most of the detail to them. Most of the time we do this correctly. The guidance is in place, so for those articles that don't do it correctly, can't it be addressed on a case-by-case basis?--Father Goose (talk) 22:12, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
There is nothing in the Summary Style article about using the the main article and the summary as a tool to reduce duplication and contradiction between articles discussing the same topic. If this is non-controversial it should be added to the article. BradMajors (talk) 22:35, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Brad here. There is no WP policy against duplication; WP:NO DUPLICATION is a red link. Thus, duplicate content abounds, which leads to contradictions and confusion. This problem was not significant in the early years but has now become, in my opinion, the single most important flaw in WP. This summary style page is the only that adresses this issue, and it sucks. Emmanuelm (talk) 16:54, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
Re. "This summary style page is the only that adresses this issue": no, again, there is Wikipedia:Content fork too, which, in fact, gives a more comprehensive treatment of the "duplication of content" issue. Or do you want me to "duplicate" the answer I gave you above in #No one understands this policy -- do something!?
The Wikipedia:Content fork page also has some examples of where duplicate content will be unavoidable, e.g.: "[...] clearly Joséphine de Beauharnais will contain a significant amount of information also in Napoleon I of France [...]". A total ban on content duplication would be absurdistan. The Wikipedia:Content fork page gives a quite reasonable near-policy-level approach to this issue. --Francis Schonken (talk) 17:47, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
Francis, the WP:CFORK does touch on the duplication issue, but it is not its main purpose. As for the actual mechanism recommended to remove duplication (the issue debated here, for your info), it refers to... WP:SUMMARY. Hence, we are here, not there.
Let me rephrase the issue here : what policy/guideline/style must one evoke at United States to tell them to shorten their very sizeable and detailed history paragraph, an obvious duplication of the History of the United States article? WP:SUMMARY, of course. What if they send you to hell? There's your problem. Emmanuelm (talk) 18:30, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

I hate sterile arguments, so here is my idea :

  • There should be a clear guideline against duplication, and it should become a sixth pillar of WP.
  • This guideline should be embodied by a restructure of Wikipedia : summary articles will be created to cover all issues, will be locked and managed by a group of editors.
  • The summary articles will be divided in chapters corresponding to main articles for all to edit.
  • The summary articles will contain only a lead paragraph and chapter headings; the chapter content will be the lead paragraphs of the corresponding articles, fetched by the WP server like pictures are currently handled. Therefore, other than its lead paragraph, the summary article's text will all be editable by everyone, as long as they go to the right place. This looks a bit like the current WP categories, but with more flesh and better organization.
  • There is no limit to the number of orders in this hierarchy. Thus, History of the World will be a summary article composed of lead paragraphs from many articles including History of Europe, itself a summary of many articles including History of France, itself a summary of many articles including the French Revolution, itself a main article editable by all.
  • All WP articles should be listed in at least one summary article; no "orphan" page. To avoid fights, articles may be included in many summaries. We will need a procedure to include or exclude articles from a given summary -- who wants his favorite country listed in the State terrorism summary page?

If all this is applied, I predict that Wikipedia will lose about 30% of its weight, will be more welcoming to old friends, more approachable by new friends and, therefore, more sexy. Emmanuelm (talk) 19:21, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

In regard to the above, I totally agree that the topic of how to organize content on Wikipedia is extremely important, deserves its own policy, and should form a sixth pillar of Wikipedia. Something similar to the above would be an improvement. The first step is to get agreement that Wikipedia needs a policy on how to organize content. BradMajors (talk) 14:12, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
After writing the above, I kept thinking and started regretting the part about summary articles being blocked to all except editors. With so much centralized control, Wikipedia would be as sexy as a Soviet babushka. I now think it would be best to write down the rules and let the ummah deal with them. Emmanuelm (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 18:44, 7 February 2008 (UTC)
I agree with some of what you wrote and disagree with other points, but I think us discussing this subject here is not going to go anywhere. This subject should be discussed as a potential Wikipedia guideline and I don't know how to bring that about. BradMajors (talk) 20:23, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
Try Wikipedia:Village pump (policy); I'll see you there. Emmanuelm (talk) 14:35, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
Discussion moved to: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Eliminating duplications (was Organization of content on Wikipedia) please jump in. Discussion of how to make a summary of an article should remain here. BradMajors (talk) 20:44, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
... If it would be better if my posting appeared on (policy) please move it. BradMajors (talk) 20:47, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
Brad, I "advertized" the debate at the Village pump (policy). Emmanuelm (talk) 19:05, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

The Wikipedia:User talk page has been upgraded to policy, while WP:SUMMARY is still a guideline. Sickening. Emmanuelm (talk) 18:55, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

No, one person slapped the "guideline" (not policy) banner on it, which was quickly reverted. The future of that proposal in general is very much in doubt.--Father Goose (talk) 23:07, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Summary Citations and References

Since an article summary summarizes the content on a main article page, I would contend a summary should have no citations. The citations should instead be in the main article. Similarly, references should not be listed for the summary since the only source for the content is the main article. WP:REF says that the reference section is for listing "in which the sources that were used are listed". Instead, summaries should have an "Further Reading" section for sources which provide an overview of the topic. BradMajors (talk) 20:52, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

I have updated this section of the article. If there is disagreement, edit this section some more or discuss the issues. BradMajors (talk) 18:55, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

This section of the article does not follow WP:Summary guidelines for performing a summary of a main article. BradMajors (talk) 17:38, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Shortcuts

Why is only WP:SUMMARY visible? I tried fixing the box, didn't work. Perhaps someone else could look into this. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 21:05, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Adenda to "Always_mention_in_the_edit_summary_when_splitting"

This section should indicate to add a notice to the talk page explaining why the page was splitted, in addition to the edit summary. This is because of a problem here [6] where I chastised the page creator for not making any mention of the page split because there had been already more than a hundred edits (so I didn't look at the page creation edit), and I'm not familiarized with this guideline. As a popular page has more and more edits, there is less chance that people will look at the article creation edit summary before complaining about why the page was split "for no apparent reason, and the talk page says nothing".

There ought to be a template, for either the talk page or the article page, saying {{split from|article|reason}} so it's easy to see the reason. --Enric Naval (talk) 13:54, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I agree that a template would be very useful. —Quasirandom (talk) 02:59, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

What are the percentages of readers that you try to satisfy

I propose the following percentages as the best possible results

  • summary
    • sufficiently informative for 70% of the readers and for 10% even the summary is too long
    • So 30% will continue to read (parts of) the main article
  • main article
    • sufficiently informative for 90% of the 30% who will read it
    • So 3% will read one or more ancillary articles/spin off articles or parts thereof
  • spin offs
    • sufficiently informative for 33% of 3% of the readers who came that far
    • So one percent misses information in Wikipedia that cannot be found in one of the spin off articles

Andries (talk) 20:34, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Where is it desirable for a search engine to point a visitor?
Why put much effort into editing pages that are not desired to be highly-ranked in a search engine? The guideline says: "To keep articles synchronized, editors should first add any new material to the appropriate places in the main article, and if appropriate, summarize the material in the summary article."
If only 30 percent of visitors are expected to read a main article, I am less inclined to do much editing there. In areas where I am a "knowledgeable editor", I prefer to "write it once." If my contribution will be ignored unless I duplicate it in the summary article, I might leave both articles alone.
If I do duplicate the content in the summary article and the search engine points the visitor there, then 70% of visitors are oblivious to the existence of fine points which I thought were important enough to add to the main article. The curiosity of that 70% is never piqued beyond a minimal level if they don't even so much as load a page which speaks directly to their area of interest. Their curiosity was exhausted by searching for an answer somewhere in a more general summary-style article.
Wide-ranging 'summary style' articles seem like they:
  • Try to perform a function beyond the optimum scope in a hyperlink-enabled encyclopedia
  • Waste efforts by knowledgeable editors
  • Exhaust the curiosity of visitors

-Ac44ck (talk) 01:07, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

GFDL concern

If you cut the material from Article A and paste it to a new Article A1, you seem to have a WP:GFDL issue b/c there is no edit summary indicating the source and attribution will appear to be entirely to the editor doing the split - rarely correct. There would seem to be two ways around this - short of a full history merge: 1) create the new article with a {{longcomment}} or other place holder and then paste to the split article to the target with an appropriate edit summary clearly indicating the source, or 2) after splitting, create a minor edit for the sole purpose of leaving an edit summary clearly indicating the source. Thoughts?--Doug.(talk • contribs) 13:56, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

When I split up an article my standard practice is to include a links to source and destination in the edit summaries, just like when I merge articles. I do this in the edit summary of the edit that actually introduces/removes the material, not sure why you'd need to mae a minor edit afterward unless it slipped your mind on the first edit; the edit summaries are usually something like "splitting out of source article" and "splitting section to destination article". It's not ideal but in theory that means that someone who's browsing the history of an article looking for the sources of the article's text will be able to easily find the other edit histories containing the material that would otherwise have just mysteriously "shown up". Hopefully one day there will be automated tools clever enough to track down all these bits of text and make it even easier. Bryan Derksen (talk) 16:00, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
Duh! For some reason I thought that when you created a new article you only got a default edit summary, I have no idea why I thought that, other than the fact that new sections of an existing page do that. Yes, these edit summaries sound good and maybe they should be incorporated into this guideline.--Doug.(talk • contribs) 17:46, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Rationale

Change "30 KB of prose" to "30 KB". When you are editing an article it is byte count that you have access to, not prose character count, and prose character count is less important in limiting article size than edit byte count anyway. Anytime an article is longer than 32 kB byte count, the byte count shows up in your browser as a reminder that you need to start thinking about splitting the article into subarticles. 199.125.109.100 (talk) 04:48, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea, why don't you make the changes? Be Bold!--Doug.(talk • contribs) 14:28, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
 Done 199.125.109.100 (talk) 14:38, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
What appears in the edit box is not necessarily indicative of the size of the article. Extensive <ref>s, table markup, or other wikimarkup can easily double the bytecount of an article without making it "long". Further, list articles are held to a different standard of "length" (up to ~200k is considered practical).
If you want to know the prose size, copy the article (as displayed in your browser, not in the edit box) into a word processor that can do character counts, and remove the reference list, external links, and other non-prose sections.--Father Goose (talk) 20:50, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

May need a different example at the top of the Characteristics section

The example at the top of the Characteristics section is the World War II article.

I went there to see how well it fit the suggested form.

Only two of the four major sections had clearly identified Main Articles.

I didn't see a main article indentified for any of the eleven subsections in the World War II article.

And the article size, according to Google, is 243 kb. It seems like a longish summary if it is intended to be a pointer to elsewhere.

A discussion at the Village Pump inspired me to look. -Ac44ck (talk) 00:01, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Image size is the biggest variable in download times. The html size of the WWII article is only 65K, which is about 15 seconds on dialup. And I'm on dialup, and I don't think the WWII article is too long or takes too long to load up, even with the images included (about a minute load time total, and I can start reading it long before it's fully loaded). However, you're right that WWII is not the best example of a "summary"-style article. I'll switch our example to History of the United States instead.--Father Goose (talk) 04:25, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
Hmm, nah, scratch switching to History of the United States; the WWII "summary article" in the sidebar is a good example of a summary article. Although it doesn't match what our actual WWII article looks like, the sidebar is just right for illustrative purposes and I don't care that the actual article looks somewhat different (this is an unavoidable problem anyway, since articles always evolve).--Father Goose (talk) 05:09, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
LOL! Earlier in this talk page (here and here), to illustrate the total disregard of most editors for WP:SUMMARY I used as an example the unduly large size of the the History paragraph in the "summary" article United States and its useless duplication of History of the United States.
Your difficulties finding one good pair of summary & main articles is proof of this disregard. Emmanuelm (talk) 17:49, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
I didn't try that hard. I just suggested History of the United States because I remembered how many "main article" links it has. I personally don't think it's a problem that some articles contain up to half the text found in the subarticle; there are times when a lot of detail is pertinent to a given section or article, but still more detail can be contained in a subarticle.
I also changed my mind about switching the example because I realized the example in the guideline is not the article World War II, but an example based on how that article could be structured. The example as given is perfect, so I wouldn't change it just because the WWII article itself isn't as good an example.--Father Goose (talk) 00:22, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

no summaries is bad, deleting summaries is worse

More and more I'm seeing editors spin off subarticles without summarizing them in the main article. Instead they leave just the section heading and a Main Article link and no text whatsoever. I've even seen people delete the summaries in the main article saying they're redundant or that there's no need for a summary since the link is adequate. Can we please put something in this guideline to specifically discourage that? Wikipedia articles should be able to stand on their own. Simply linking to subarticles isn't adequate. Deleting summarized content is especially egregious, but there's nothing in this guideline that specifically discourages it. Kaldari (talk) 18:43, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Sometimes I've seen subarticles that can't or shouldn't be summarized, such as "list of episodes" for a TV series. However, perhaps that is only true for list subarticles (I like to think of them as appendices to the main article). Overall, I agree that at least a couple of sentences' worth of summary should remain (or several paragraphs, depending on importance; for instance, "History of" subtopics are always worth a few paragraphs, given that a history article on most topics could be 50K on its own).--Father Goose (talk) 04:09, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
Afterthought: I've seen a number of people suggest (on this page and elsewhere) that summaries are redunant and can become unsynchronized with the full article. My feeling is that all articles should be a well-rounded standalone treatment of their topic. This is why summaries are needed; there's no value in having an Earth article that is just one link after another to History of Earth, plate tectonics, Earth's atmosphere, Earth's magnetic field, Earth's rotation, and so on. Each of those articles can give 10 pages worth of detail on their respective topics, and the Earth article should give an in-line introduction (through summaries) to each subtopic. (Side note: John J. Bulten suggested above that this should be done through the transclusion of the lead section of each subarticle in order to cut down on redundancy and content forking. However, I think that's a technical approach which creates far more problems than it stands to solve.)--Father Goose (talk) 04:21, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
Thank you so much for remembering! Would you believe I was just here visiting today because I'm so self-satisfied for setting up "Sabbath" in summary style?
I am now understanding better not to get overworried about redundancy. However, it would be nice if organizational strengths started bubbling up toward real substance in WP policy, especially if the interface programmers could get a handle on it. Wouldn't it be great if they could just autolink main and sub with something like a template in any two articles a user chose to link, so that an edit to the section in main or the lead in sub would automatically propagate to the other?
For right now since there has been no objection or other notice, and since there are no open controversies about it, I'm going to be WP:BOLD and moderate that "twice as long" language a hair. Obligatory trivia: Dmitri Borgmann pointed out that one spelling of the Papago (tribe) was "Papagoose". JJB 15:17, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
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