Talk:Open top bus

Proposed merger

Open top buses in the United Kingdom is an orphan with no recent edit activity. Most of the information duplicates (or belongs) in the Open top bus article, and the lists of routes and operators - if it is notable - could be added as new sections to prompt similar information for other countries. Geof Sheppard (talk) 12:37, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

• Oppose Merging would completely skew the world view of the main article, and I don't see how any of it 'belongs' in the main article, it's all pretty UK specific, let alone "most" of it. If anything, it's the main article which has a little bit too much UK specific info. I don't see how merging would encourage anyone to create info on other countries. If the issue is lack of visibility, add a proper summary split {Main} hatted section for country specific sub-articles in the main article, but with only such article so far, that's going to look rather odd. The fact it is an orphan is fixable, and irrelevant to whether it shoud be merged. The fact that it's had no recent activity is completely irrelevant. And notability of the list of routes/operators is also irrelevant - notability governs topics, not sub-sectional content. It's surely not being argued that 'Open top buses in the United Kingdom' is not notable enough for its own article surely? MickMacNee (talk) 14:20, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

• • I don't think that merging would skew the over-arching article. As my initial proposal suggested, it should encourage similar information about open top buses in other countries if the UK history is clealry identified as such. I think the merger would be in line with the Manual of Style's view that except in content with a local focus ... content should be presented from a global view. Geof Sheppard (talk) 12:46, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
    • In my experience, it doesn't, and I should know as I've done it both ways on several topics. Merging this would not present the topic in a global view at all, it would make that global article be over 50% about the UK in terms of size (and probably more if looking at what's there already as said above). I'll repeat, the present UK article has practically nothing in it that could be considered global, so unless you are proposing to actually lose lots of info in this merge, then the unbalancing effect of it is inescapable. The MoS is quite clear in cases of unbalanced articles - summarise and split the notional sub-topics, and in that regard, splitting by country is perfectly valid. It's probably the most common method infact. As said, you're more than welcome to add a UK summary section to the main article to spur others to add other country material, the presence of this article has no negative effect on that at all. MickMacNee (talk) 18:10, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

• 'Oppose, although I doubt this is going to happen given the lack of discussion and improvements to the smaller article in the past five months. The sources in the article are more than enough to establish notability for the topic, and there's too much content to merge here without either a) losing sourced content or b) giving undue weight to one country over the rest of the world (or possibly both). Similar information for other countries is somewhat lacking in general (Malta being an exception), but that won't be fixed by merging these two articles. Alzarian16 (talk) 16:21, 14 September 2011 (UTC)