User talk:Joopercoopers/Tabbed articles

Election/sports coverage

Election and sports coverage on WP seems to generate large amounts of statistic data that couldn't be incorporated in one tab - would we have subdivisions of the statistics tab in this case, eg. opinion polling data, voting data or some other way of organisation - or keep such articles as they are? --Joopercoopers (talk) 14:58, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Solution - If the Stats tab starts to exceed WP:SIZE the page is rewritten as a link list of the various statistical pages relating to the main article. --Joopercoopers (talk) 23:55, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Straw men

Objections based on convenience and printing are also somewhat fallacious, since the splitting of articles on the purely pragmatic basis of length is a long-established practice, with links back-and-forth between the main article and the more specialised subtopic. Printing Germany will not also print History of Germany, but of course will print the short "History of Germany" section in the main article. As long as the main page contains a precis of what's in each of the tabs, there can't really be any objection here. Tabs simply offer a convenient way of linking this material together.

A practical example from WikiProject Aircraft: articles about aircraft types on Wikipedia typically contain a number of standard sections, including details of subtypes ("variants") of that aircraft, the operators of that type of aircraft, accidents involving that type of aircraft, and preserved examples of that type of aircraft. For aircraft types that have had long and varied careers, these sections are (increasingly) often split off - both for length, and because of the dry statistical nature of this data (see: Category:Lists of aircraft variants, Category:Lists of aircraft operators by aircraft type, Category:Aviation accidents and incidents by aircraft, and Category:Survivors (aircraft).

These subpages already exist - doesn't grouping them together with a tab system make things easier and more convenient for our readers? --Rlandmann (talk) 00:01, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Re. Printing, quite right - indeed tabs give more control over what you can print. There's similar fallacious arguments about the relative ease of parsing subpages - it's got to be just as easy to click a top of the page 'gallery' link than scroll through the lead and find it at the bottom of the TOC.--Joopercoopers (talk) 00:09, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

The tab interface is also, I think, very familiar to most computer users (not to mention its use in the print world), and increasingly so with its adoption onto the current generation of browsers. --Rlandmann (talk) 00:12, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

And at the top of every wikipedia viewers screen too! I am concerned that the tabs don't get used for additional prose articles, otherwise we get the hierarchical and arbitrariness(?) alluded to here (Although you'll see there they were trying to organise the cataloguing system with subpages)--Joopercoopers (talk) 00:26, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

An example tabbed aircraft article

Here's an example constructed from already existing articles about the B-17 Flying Fortress (plus an image gallery from Commons). Two of the traditional objections to this approach are arbitrariness and hierarchy. Well, of course all divisions and groupings of knowledge are arbitrary; here on Wikipedia, we decide such matters by consensus-building, and deciding whether to tab or not tab a section of an article is not significantly different from deciding whether to split or merge an article; something that we do all the time. I think this is also a case of a clear-cut hierarchy of articles; none of the sub-articles really stand alone without the main article. I acknowledge that the decision is not always so clear cut.

But this brings me to another point. I know that this system is not being developed with the idea of including prose articles under tabs, but since we're dreaming and exploring possibilities... There's no reason why an article couldn't appear under several different tabbed sets. I can't think of a good example right now, so I'll use the "History of SmallEuropeanCountry". The objection that it's unclear whether this should be a subarticle of "History" or a subarticle of "SmallEuropeanCountry" is pretty much irrelevant when "History of SmallEuropeanCountry" could appear as a tab under "SmallEuropeanCountry" and as a tab under "History of Europe" and even as a stand-alone article if this article were transcluded into the tabs of whatever article it appears within. --Rlandmann (talk) 02:25, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm mulling on this Rlandmann, in case you think I'm ignoring you. I like it, but I'm worried and considering whether the proposal might be better abandoning the idea of subpages and instead just using the tabs idea to navigate (which I think is kind of what you're doing). --Joopercoopers (talk) 13:50, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I see the difference in approach. Actually, until one of your earlier comments on this page, I hadn't realised that subpages were an integral part of the proposal. Don't worry - I don't feel ignored :) There's a lot to think about here, and I expect this will take a long time.

BTW - transclusion in articlespace doesn't presently work (as you've seen) - it would have to be turned on by the devs. --Rlandmann (talk) 20:16, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Can I offer a couple of refutations regarding “Convenience”? Having all the information on one page just makes the page very long, leading to reader fatigue; that’s a key reason substantive articles tend to become summary-style article with many referents. Furthermore, certain types of sections have a tendency to grow to an “undue” percentage of the article length. To use Rlandmann’s example, it’s not uncommon for some aircraft to have very lengthy “Variants” and “Operators” sections (cf. B-17 Flying Fortress and F-16 Fighting Falcon). Such material begs to be migrated to” sub-articles”, if you will. I also like the idea of relegating galleries to a different page, for the same reason (plus they can make the page slow to download for some readers). Furthermore, sections like “Survivors” and “Trivia” (… er, “XXX in popular culture”) which are truly ancillary to the main article would be readily accessible for those readers who are interested. Askari Mark (Talk) 23:26, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Similar question on the Wiki-en-L mailing list

Hi JC - just wanted to let you know that User:Phil Sandifer has brought up a very similar idea on the wiki-en-L mailing list (that is, tabbed pages). I've suggested that he communicate with you and have provided the link to this page. I'm going to admit all this developer talk is a bit over my head, but from what I can see, this is a good idea that is worth investigating. Best, Risker (talk) 17:01, 2 September 2008 (UTC)