Talk:Concise Wikipedia

Keeping articles concise

I feel that a limiting the spectrum of reliable sources to books and such would be a better way of keeping articles concise than a word limit. Much of the bloat in enwiki is the result of users attempting to stuff everything the most recent news articles and tabloids say into encyclopedic articles. --Michaeldsuarez (talk) 20:54, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Putting aims together

What would you think about a Wikikids filling the need you point here, and putting aims together for better viability ? Astirmays (talk) 23:51, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

the different problems

There's a key problem here: The low quality of writing on major topics, which is hopeless without a different type of editor. It is extraordinarily difficult to write good nontrivial articles, & there are simply not enough skilled editors hereto meet the requirements. The education program was an attempt to remedy this, but though it has produced some good articles, the proportion is not all that much better than average, and it has so far proven impossible to get more than a very small number of people to continue writing after their first assignment. Probably there is more to be hoped for in the participation of professional societies. Even more difficult is the need for consistent high quality editing to maintain quality. I do not think a community editing project where anyone can edit will ever rise above mediocre quality. Our goal should be to not come below it--above is unreachable. The greater the degree of summarization, the more skilled the writing must be. Even among the scholarly societies, many more are capable of specialized writing than of general introductions.

There's a question of to what extent this should be a separate project, There are different needs: to take a very straightforward example, I sometimes want a correct brief reminder of what a movie is about, but I sometimes am looking for careful and detailed compendium of the available criticism and analysis. The simplest solution for the organizational problem is the consistent use of Summary Style, which to a considerable extent could be done with the existing material and a rearrangement rather than rewriting What I think is intended, and is probably a good idea, is to make the first level general article into a relatively short sketch, shorter than is now customary, and then to extract these into a separate project. I'd rather see this done within the existing project, as an extract version available to the readers.

I personally would never use it. I can only judge by myself: I read printed matter much more carefully than I do online, because I rely on my very rapid but very accurate scanning, and this can not yet be done well without the uniformity of presentation of good printing. The smaller the screen, the more impossible it is. Even for pure data, I want as much on a page simultaneously as possible, and I will select out of it by myself what parts I need. To some extent I'm the product of a different era, but I see many younger people just as good at it as I. What I want is detail, and then I can read only as much as I need at the time; but I want to know there is more. I would absolutely objet to anything done for simplification that would adversely affect the detail in the main encyclopedia. My view is that we need more, rather than less, at least for about 99% of the articles.

My own interest in a separate project would be in the opposite direct: a peer-reviewed authoritatively edited WP, essentially what was hoped for with Citizendium.

I have no personal use for an encyclopedic dictionary. Their only merit was their smaller physical size & cost as compared to a full encyclopedia. Now we have only the size to be concerned about. thus removing half the importance. DGG (talk) 02:28, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

That's not their only merit at all DGG. Not everybody has your skills of extracting important facts from bloated articles. You're an experienced librarian, not a school kid needing quick facts. Short concise summaries of encyclopedic topics would have more value than you think. You're right that a lot of wikipedia articles are devoid of text, but you have to admit that having a consistently reliable encyclopedia with similar length articles is a problem and wikipedia is failing to accomplish this at present. Seriously, 90% of articles I approach are either severely lacking or so bloated that they're virtually unreadable. I want something where you can get a quick summary in general browsing where every article is concise and easy to digest and learn and above all consistently the same length. You could argue that the purpose of the lead of wikipedia articles would accomplish what I'm looking for here, but how many articles have no lead or a lead which does not effectively summarize a topic? The vast majority. An extract version within wikipedia itself though would be a great idea. (from Blofeld)

I tend to agree with DGG. I'm not sure the solution to the problem of inadequate leads or impenetrable articles is to create yet another Wikipedia that has to be maintained in parallel. In my view a better strategy would be to start a WikiProject for improving the leads and accessibility of articles on Wikipedia itself. Calliopejen1 (talk) 00:09, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

I also agree with DGG and think that Callipejen1's point on maintenance is well taken, too. Think about it: which is easier a) improving article leads or b) writing whole new ones on a different wiki? Now ask yourself what happens when the leads need to be updated but the majority of the updaters are on Wikipedia, not this other project. – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 06:52, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Agreed with DGG, Calliopejen1 and Philosopher. Dank (talk) 22:43, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Me too. --Avenue (talk) 09:11, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

In order for a decent lead to be written effectively summarising the article, the articles themselves need to be fully written and this is mostly not the case. There is so much junk and bloat on wikipedia an encyclopedic dictionary type resource cutting out the crap and focusing on the stark main points is something never likely to happen on english wikipeda. The average length lead for a developed article is longer than I envisage. If you are keen on providing information and providing a flexible way to do this you would consider that some people would find learning in such a way easier if they want to learn generally about a topic, especially when checking quick facts using mobile phones. I would support a different mode within english wikipedia itself in a summarized version. The editors required to produce the summary articles though, you have a point about their efforts need on the leads of wikipedia articles though.81.105.63.121 13:58, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Comments (from EnWiki Village Pump)

A sitewide commitment to lead and intro improvement would be more practical, IMO. An undertaking like the one mentioned in the proposal might be feasible, I guess, if it were done on a WikiProject-by-WikiProject basis, though there are many WikiProjects that are either defunct or dying. dci | TALK 01:21, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

The task needed to get a full lead written on every article is too tremendous. Not only would the concise edition have shorter entries than the average fully written lead but it would start from scratch and growth would be controlled, producing fully written concise articles before submitting. Not to mention starting with core articles the 1911 Britannica edition would have had,or whatever, and focusing on the important stuff writing an effective summary. That's would I envisage anyway. So the benefits of starting a new project far outweigh commitment to WP:LEAD, its not the same thing at all. Not to mention that a concise wiki edition I envisage a virtual book format with the ability to present several articles on a given topic on the page at once to give nice summary overviews. Like a category would feature summaries of every entry in it. You can't achieve that with WP:LEAD.

The task of writing an entire new "Concise Wikipedia" seems at least as tremendous. A drive to improve lead sections doesn't have to spread its efforts thinly across all our millions of articles. Why shouldn't it also focus on core topics to start with, for instance? It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to write a tool that extracts just the lead sections for a selection of articles, either. --Avenue (talk) 09:11, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

That;s the idea, focus on the sort of articles 1911 Britannica would have had and up to date core articles up course, so we at least have a reliable consistent encyclopedic outline to build upon.81.105.63.121 19:48, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Similar outside project: 'Thunkpedia'

I'm working on an not-yet-launched personal project, Thunkpedia, similar in some dimensions. The idea is all reliable reference info is welcome, but must be contributed in capped-size, well-labelled chunks (called 'Thunks'). The word 'article' is avoided because there's no intent to impose a 1:1 mapping from 'titles' to chunks. However, I expect that full-text search (and a novel dynamic re-ranking interface) will be the main discovery mechanism, and searching for a well-defined topic should yield a nice concise top-level summary thunk for that topic (and other related thunks, if the reader chooses to 'drill down' for more detail). The content will be CC-SA licensed for easy two-way sharing of well-crafted reference text with Wikipedia, and I intend the software to be open source (but not MediaWiki-based; the current prototype is Django/Python-based). More details are available at my project blog. Gojomo (talk) 04:55, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

More branching

I don't see the point of yet more branching, and confusing the users with more places to go. Not sure that the outcome of the concept is that different from Simple Wikipedia's concept, and I feel that there is scope for some mingling of ideas where a framework exists. — billinghurst sDrewth 08:17, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

It seems pretty clear that the goal is quite different. You could clearly imagine examples where something is concise but not simple, and simple but not concise. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:53, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Readability isn't one of enwiki's priorities

en:Wikipedia_talk:Five_pillars#Accessibility_and_equality – Judging from the responses so far, conciseness and readability aren't things they wish to prioritize. --Michaeldsuarez (talk) 20:01, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

To launch or not?

So far, at least so far as I can see, there seems to be some substantial indicators of support here, although there does seem to be some reasonable discussion about the specific guidelines and policies which might apply here. Being myself new to this sort of thing, what if anything is to be done at this point, or do we wait longer for some sort of specific goal, or what? John Carter (talk) 22:00, 20 January 2013 (UTC)