From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Often I do cross-cut editing to make broad families of articles more consistent.
I am a strong believer that much information that is in prose language in paragraphs of text (which vary widely from article to article) belong in tabular/list form to be more consistently accessible when viewed in the context of an encyclopedia set. When one opens up Encyclopædia Britannica does one find wide variance among articles on similar topics? In general, no. For-profit encyclopedia firms employ authors and editors whose mandate is to create an encyclopedia set that is a comprehensive whole with a common look and feel. If some type of information is important in one specialized article of a generalized topic, then it highly likely that analogous information of that type is important in all other specialized articles of that generalized topic.
Along a similar line of thought, I find that too many articles are too pontificating of some fan's advertisement/evangelization of their favorite topic. This is especially true among some of the university/college articles (especially small private schools that need to self-promote themselves for financial survival). Also this is especially true for interstate highway fanatics who enjoy extolling the virtues of their favorite section of highway, making it sound as thought it is the most important strip of concrete in the USA or the world.
Wikipedia needs to work to balance the elimination of this sectionalism and oneupmanship with keeping people interested in contributing appropriately.
Along a similar line of thought, inflexible consistency is equally undesirable. For example, if one tried to ram through a "state amphibian" (or "state fungus" or "state whatever topic") through for a template infobox for use in all fifty states, then what does one do if less than 50 states have that official state thingy? I view this as a fundamental technical problem with template infoboxes that certain fields should be able to be designated as optional in the template infobox definition.
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