User:Siroxo/rants

Overseparation

Overseparation is a term (I think) I coined for a pet peeve of mine. I am currently fleshing out the details of what I think the problem is, and how to solve it, tell me what you think!

The overseparation of information on Wikipedia refers to the splitting of information between pages when it could (and should) be on one page. Very often, stubs and substubs are created by overseparation of subtopics from a main topic page. In general, this makes it harder to sift through the information to find what is desired, and also decreases the quality of the information in Wikipedia by diluting it.

Whenever creating a stub, or removing something from the main topic page to its own page, make sure this isn't just overcategorizing the information. When creating several related subpages for one main topic page, consider making one subpage with section links for redirects. If you're only making one short subpage, set up a similar redirect to a section on the main page.

Granted there are many times when a topic is different enough that it requires a short separate page, however its still important to think about how the info in Wikipedia is presented. I have recently decided that templates such as Template:NarniaCharacters and Template:ASOIAFPlaces can be of great use to connect information that is separated for organizational reasons. Such templates add an ease-of-use in my opinion, and should be used in cases where information must be separated to be presented properly.

That said, overseparation does occur more often than is convenient for people browsing the Wikipedia.

Some prime examples of overseparation:

• Giving game expansion packs their own page
• Giving minor characters from books and movies their own page

The blank line

I'm sure others have noticed, but many times there are blank lines at the top of wikitexts, resulting in blank lines at the top of the page. Sometimes this is desired for printing purposes, but it seems like this is not something that the wikitext formatting should affect.

What is especially annoying is that this extraneous blank line is left when people want to put language links, category links, images, or comments on the top line, and leave blank line before the actual text, to make it easier to read, for example:

 <!--Please do not give spoilers in this top section -->

'''My article''' is a [[bs]] [[article]] for example purposes.

renders with a blank line above the top line, even though thats not the desired effect.

My thoughts is that the wikitext renderer should work in the following way:

• Blank lines before the main text of a wikitext are ignored when rendering an article
• The renderer adds a standard amount of whitespace to the top of all article
• The way to add extra blank lines if they are truly needed would be to use <br/>.

I think this would solve a ton of formatting problems that occur at the top of pages, and make the overall appearence of Wikipedia much neater.