Template talk:Bad structure

A little bit of background is at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Anti- news style template?. Melchoir 05:46, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I work for a newspaper, and I'm going to edit this to be less negative toward newspapers. Maurreen 19:47, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I didn't mean to be negative towards newspapers; it's just that newspapers and Wikipedia work under different constraints towards different goals, and neither should imitate the other. Perhaps there should be a project page fully describing the differences? Melchoir 19:53, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK, you're forgiven. Before a project, you might not realize that WP has advocated news style here and here.

What are you after? Less choppiness in the articles? Maurreen 21:24, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And I look bad because I'm making a lot of typos, but I'm not on the clock. Oh, well we all need an editor. Maurreen 21:26, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Less choppiness is always nice, but that's just a voice issue. I certainly wouldn't support a template for, say, too many commas. No, I'm really concerned about the logical presentation of content:

As a reader, if I want to know a specific detail, I should quickly be able to determine (1) if it's in the article (or elsewhere in Wikipedia) and (2) if so, where.
While reading, I should never have to wonder if the article intends to expand in detail on an idea. If the article mentions an idea in the lead section, I should be confident that it will be explained below. If the article finishes talking about an idea in the body, I should be confident that reading later paragraphs would not change my understanding of that idea.
I should understand how facts fit into the subject and the plan of the article. While I am reading, I should know exactly what I'm reading about.
As an editor, if I have new information for the article, I should know where to put it. If I make a change, I should not have to wonder if my change must be duplicated across other sections.

As a consequence of these principles, isolated details should be incorporated into prose; ideas should be organized into clearly defined subtopics with explicit section titles; background should come first; and events should occur exactly once, in order.

Now, I'm sure no one is as militant as all that, and rules are meant to be broken... but only for a good reason. This template is for cases when there clearly isn't one. Melchoir 22:45, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like what you're getting at above is the problem of poor organization. If that's the case, and if there is going be a template, then that's what it needs to focus on -- not style, and not paragraph length, and not newspapers. Maurreen 23:09, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Short paragraphs are the most visible symptom of poor organization, and the two issues share a common solution-- reorganization-- which is the focus of the template. The newspaper bit draws on the viewer's experience of newspapers and reminds that not all writing is the same. If the template omits that, the problem becomes abstract and harder to understand. Melchoir 23:23, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree that short paragraphs have any relation to poor organization. We have two different subjective views. Can you offer any compromise that does not single out newspapers? Maurreen 23:36, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hooray for different views! In my experience editing Wikipedia, an orphaned sentence always either belongs in some other paragraph, demands expansion into a new paragraph, or is so disconnected with the rest of the article that it's irrelevant and ought to be deleted. Sometimes it's even a sneaky attempt to color the reader's take on the previous paragraph, but that's comparatively rare, and it opens a whole new set of problems. The other possibilities aren't organization issues, but "belongs in some other paragraph" is the most common.

A compromise... how about "This article or section is arranged in an unencyclopedic variant of news writing structure?" Melchoir 23:52, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's OK. I'm not in love with it, but it's much better. Thanks. Maurreen 23:59, 29 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not in love with it either, but didn't some famous wiseass point out that a compromise should leave no one happy?

I guess we'll have to move the template title too. Any ideas? Melchoir 00:05, 30 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Um ... maybe "article structure" or "poor organization"? Maurreen 00:18, 30 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Or just "structure"? The shorter these are, the easier they are to use... Melchoir 00:59, 30 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK. I was just trying to be clear that the template is about articles and not structures, or whatever. Maurreen 02:49, 30 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]