User:BlankVerse/Merge WikiProject ideas

WP Merge?

This was originally posted to User:Radiant!'s Talk page.

Since you are the most active and most vocal "Mergist" that I know of on the Wikipedia, I thought that I would share some of my recent thoughts with you. As the evidence in Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Tony Sidaway clearly shows, there is a gaping hole in the procedures on the Wikipedia as far as merging goes. People are often saying at WP:VFD that the information in a VFD'd article doesn't deserve to be an article all by itself, but the information should be preserved somewhere on the Wikipedia, either in an existing article, or in a newly created overview or survey article. Unfortunately, there currently is no organized effort for doing these merges.

What probably should be done is the creation of Wikipedia:WikiProject Merge, which would be responsible for handling the merge votes at WP:VFD as well most other article merge tasks. Along with the creation of the new WikiProject, there should also be a new Wikipedia namespace article (Wikipedia:Merge requests?) that would be the place for listing all the merge requests from VFD, as well as all article merge requests other than duplicate articles. Finally, there should be a new merge template (either repurpose template:mergeinto, which is currently a redirect to {{merge}} and only used on three articles, or perhaps {{bigmerge}}?) that would be used to identify all the articles that need to be moved to consolidation articles. (Plus there should be some tweaking of the WP:DA article and its associated templates and categories to make clear that they are only for articles on clearly similar topics.)

As an example of a good consolidation article, I would suggest Minor characters from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Instead of having 65 different stubby almost meaningless little articles on minor HHGTTG characters, as happens with so many other topics on the Wikipedia, you have one nice list that allows you to see many different characters together, which allows you to compare the characters and put each individual character in some context. I think that that article is close to being good enough for nomination as a Featured list candidates.

On the other hand, a good example of the types of articles that need to be merged together into a single article are all the stubby articles on the technologies in the HHGTTG. It's almost too easy to find articles that should be merged into a larger article. For example, Nately's Whore's Kid Sister, who doesn't even have a name and is only mentioned a few times in the novel, should be in Minor characters from Catch 22. Another is the Fearless Freep, who is a cartoon character that is only mentioned in one cartoon and never seen or heard, and should be in Minor Looney Tunes characters.

What do you think of these ideas? BlankVerse ∅ 08:04, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

After saying for quite awhile that I would just spend most of my time on the Wikipedia editing the articles that I want to edit, and that I would never try to organize anything on the Wikipedia, I've now been trying to get the Southern California WikiProject off the ground. Until I get enough people involved in that, I won't be getting involved in anything else. You can show my talking points to any of the "Mergists" that you know, and you might also point it out to some of those people involved in the Tony Sidaway RFC. BlankVerse ∅ 15:38, 3 August 2005 (UTC)