CZ Talk:Article structure

Separate page?

Is there a reason why this isn't part of CZ:Subpages? Maybe I need to read the page more carefully, but it looks fairly redundant...? --Larry Sanger 15:28, 23 April 2008 (CDT)

There is indeed a certain amount of overlap between this and CZ:Subpages, and a great deal of overlap among CZ:Subpages, CZ:Using the Subpages template and CZ:The Article Checklist. (The latter is something I'm longing to do something about, but if you look at User:J. Noel Chiappa/ToDo you will probably have a good idea why I haven't gotten to it yet - and that's not even counting the fact that I came here to write articles, and haven't had much time for much of that yet. :-(

So why this page? A couple of reasons. First, this thread on the forums revealed that our existing documentation was wholly inadequate to give our average non-technical contributor a 'big picture' of how it all worked. (In fact, I stole a lot of text, ideas on what needed to be presented, and how, and in what order, from that thread.) OK, fine, one might say, we clearly neeeded a lot more text, and better organized text, but... why a separate page? A couple of reasons.

For one, those pages were/are so jangled it was easier to start with a clean slate, and emit a coherent explanation in one unit, rather than try to work it into all that existing text. For another, I have this liking for having pages that take one thing, and cover it well, rather than cramming several topics into one page. Subpages (as a concept - as opposed to the mechanical details) and metadata are only distantly related. To give another, the implementation details might change in the future, and the documentation will be easier to upgrade if it's carefully and clearly modularized. One more: I like to have page names that aptly describe what's in them (and Subpages doesn't immediately say to me 'big picture of how articles work'). Etc, etc. J. Noel Chiappa 16:47, 23 April 2008 (CDT)