Wikipedia talk:Article series

Merge proposals

Please leave the merge proposal alone. If you do not like it please comment here. I think 2 weeks is an acceptable display time. Following this:

1. If there is significant opposition I will leave the pages as is
2. If there is significant support I will merge
3. If there is apathy I will probably merge

Thank you - Gareth Aus 06:08, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Almost two years have passed, but I'd like to point out that your change completely changed the subject of this guideline. This was very, very bold. (Guideline status: it wasn't marked a guideline at the time, but it was definately in the Category:Wikipedia style guidelines). The problem is that sudden change of the subject made the title inappropriate. The term "article series" intuitively refers to a situation where you have a group of loosely coupled "sister" articles, that are not suitable for Wikipedia:Summary style. And this article provides guideline exclusively for the latter now! (By the way it unnecessarily duplicates WP:SUMMARY, which is much more detailed.)

My proposition is to drop all the WP:SUMMARY stuff from here, and then decide what to do about the actual topic of "article series": either demote this guide to historical/essay, or improve it. As an example, a wild bunch of article series boxes, the "right-side boxes", surely needs some standardization. They seem to be de facto deprecated (they are to wide for 800x600 or handheld devices), they do not appear on FAs, but I'm not aware of any explicit consensus on it. --Kubanczyk (talk) 09:48, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Do whatever you like. Gareth Aus (talk) 13:29, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Unconvinced

I still am not convinced that several articles is better than one large article (in case the article really is about one single subject, such as the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict). What are really the benefits of having multiple articles? I don't find that the readability is impeded by an article being long; rather, it becomes one easy point of reference since you don't need to look in other articles for certain information, and the context that the surrounding information can provide a paragraph may also be very desirable. I did split up an article I'm actively contributing to (Speedrun), because it seems to be the default practice and it was asked for on the talk page, but I'd personally prefer monolithic articles over this approach. So maybe you could help me out here a little? I think that this project page should also address my question, since it doesn't really explain why pages need to be broken up sometimes. —msikma <user_talk:msikma> 07:53, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

For the most part, article series stem from the application of Wikipedia:Summary style. The idea is that an article that is just too long is dragged down by over detailing that is not necessarily linked to the overall topic. See for example the various subarticles of Baroque architecture (although that is not an official "article series", it is the same thing). The name might be inappropriate. If "article series" wasn't a standard element of these chronological templates and a few others, I don't think this page would even exist. Circeus 16:08, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

History of the petroleum industry in Canada

I am trying to rename the following three articles, so I can create a template and put them into a series. Unfortunately, I have made a bit of a mess of things.

Here is what I have tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to do:

1. Create a useful template "Canadianpetroleumhistory. 2. Rename the article "History of the petroleum industry in Canada, part one" to "History of the petroleum industry in Canada" 3. Rename the article "History of the petroleum industry in Canada, part two" to "History of the petroleum industry in Canada (Oil sands and heave oil) 4. Rename the article "History of the petroleum industry in Canada, part three" to "History of the petroleum industry in Canada (Frontier exploration and development) 5. Rename the article "History of the natural gas liquids industry in Canada" to "History of the petroleum industry in Canada (Natural gas liquids)

The idea is that at the end of this process this will be a series of articles about Canadian petroleum history, each referenced within the series in the manner of the History of Brazil.

Can someone help me, please? If you just fix the template and insert it properly into the first article, I will do the rest.... 04:25, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Disputed

Marked "disputed". I provided arguments in #Merge proposals section above. I know this is bold and actually I expect a revert. --Kubanczyk (talk) 15:45, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

There are differences of opinion

...on what a "guideline" is and what a page has to do to be one, but it's safe to say that this page isn't ready to be a guideline, at least not yet. Discussion is welcome. There was no discussion on making this page a guideline, no comments on the talk page since May, and it gets the main point wrong, confusing a "main" page with a "summary" page. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 20:12, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

The page was a guideline. The disputed tag was placed in May. Look at the post directly above this one.

This discussion was over months ago, and so I restored the guideline tag.

So the question is:

Do you personally wish to make this guideline disputed? If so, then leave the disputed tag, and you can bring up your converns to attempt to start a discussion.

But if not, then let's restore the guideline template. - jc37 01:28, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't have a problem with your logic, and I was aware of all that. I also don't have a problem with my logic: per WP:SILENCE, if a page is demoted, and no one talks about it or does anything about it, it's not unreasonable to assume the page no longer has consensus to be a guideline.

A guideline is something that has received a little care and attention, and has helped at least a few people get an issue resolved that they couldn't resolve without the guideline. The first sentence in the first section implies that a "main" page on Wikipedia is the same as a "summary" page, so this page hasn't any gotten care and attention, yet. For the second part: has this former guideline been helpful to you or others? If so, how? There are other pages that deal with these issues, such as Wikipedia:Manual of Style (infoboxes) and Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names)#Subsidiary articles, and a relevant wikiproject, Wikipedia:WikiProject Succession Box Standardization. Has this guideline taken the other guidelines into account? Has the relevant wikiproject been notified? (These are of course process questions, and per WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY, you don't have to answer.) - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 01:35, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Found another, a naming conventions page with a relevant example: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (long lists). - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 01:48, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

The answer to your first paragraph would be: "No, per WP:BRD, among other places (including WP:SILENCE)." The onus is on the one being bold to support the edit. Since there was no discussion to suggest that this is disputed by more than one editor, and several months of no discussion have gone by, the "disputed" tag should be removed, with the guideline restored. It's the same process used for "rejected" proposals.

As for the rest, I'll comment more below, since Quiddity addressed it somewhat too. - jc37 00:17, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

I'd like this to be (part of) a guideline, but I don't think it is one in its current state. It seems to only really cover "vertical series boxes", and the rest is just duplicated from elsewhere.

That's the main problem, but corollary issues are: It doesn't separate the templates it covers into their own category.

It often gets used to justify turning footer-navboxes into vertical-series-navboxes (because people who like/create templates often want them at the top of a page. (see Template:Video RPG and my too-subtle attempt to dissuade him at VPT)), sometimes starting edit-wars, or just redundant-duplication (see Template:Thelema and Template:Thelema series, or Template:European cinema and Template:Cinema of Europe).

Actually, I'd rather see it get merged with a current guideline. We need to cut down on how many guideline pages there are, if possible (per WP:MOSCO et al). -- Quiddity (talk) 04:20, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I think you're right about cleaning this page up. Though I think it's more than just about navboxes (list pages come to mind), perhaps transforming this into a sort of WP:CLN for such templates (indicating in what instances it's more appropriate to use each type of template, or separate list pages) might be a very good idea. - jc37 00:17, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Maybe I'm wrong, jc. There's been a lot of grumbling in general in the last few months about the messy pile of guidelines; I'm detecting that people want us to be a little tougher. I do think the page needs cleaning up; please give me a shout when you guys have done some sweeping up, and best of luck. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 02:35, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

SMcCandlish has just finished some work on Wikipedia:Naming conventions (long lists) and is looking for comments. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 01:17, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm a little late here, but I too agree that this page, at least in its present state, should not be a guideline. There should be a stricter definition of article series so that, as Quiddity says, the page will not be abused as justification for inappropriate usage of vertical series boxes. Waltham, The Duke of 14:19, 23 September 2008 (UTC)