Editing Incubator escapee wiki:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/open tasks (section)

== Merging overrepresented content ==
In addition to adding new content to underrepresented areas, we should also work on minimizing content in overrepresented ones.  It is easy to generate a hundred 1k articles out of 3k of text, if you break it up poorly and repeat yourself for a long intro paragraph in each of a hundred stubs, rather than making a single, concise page including them all.

Subjects to watch for:
* [[Star Wars]] characters and locales
* [[Star Trek]] characters and locales
* [[J. R. R. Tolkien]]-related characters and locales
* any modern television show (one article per episode summary, per throwaway character) -- particularly [[Modern animation in the United States|American]] and [[Anime|Japanese]] [[Animation|cartoons]]
* any serialized media: comic strips, comic books, serial stories, 10-part novels.  In each case, figure out what the right chunk-size is for the text...
* slang or jargon (can be moved to [[Wiktionary]], or combined into topical pages with the history of that jargon type, not one page per term)
* [[Rapid transit]], [[Light rail|light rail transit]], and [[bus rapid transit]] stations (should be combined into articles about individual rapid transit lines instead if the stations themselves are not notable)

These are all topics that ''should'' be in Wikipedia; and none of the existing content needs to be removed; but repeated content, and generation of hundreds of stubs rather than one or two good articles, is bad for readers, for categorizers, for quality-editors, and for the 'random article' feature.<small><span class="autosigned">—Preceding [[Wikipedia:Signatures|unsigned]] comment added by [[User:Sj|Sj]] ([[User talk:Sj|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/Sj|contribs]]) </span></small><!-- Template:Unsigned -->

:Not really sure what this has to do with countering systemic bias... --[[User:JerryOrr|JerryOrr]] 11:30, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

::It is relevant to systemic bias - contributors' systemic bias leads to these short messy articles. It isn't really what this project focuses on, though, which is more to do with filling in neglected areas. See umpteen discussions about choosing a less misleading name if you're interested. --[[User_talk:Cherry_blossom_tree|'''C'''herry '''b'''lossom '''t'''ree]] 22:34, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

:::isn't this akin to granting equality to cripples by chopping everyone else's legs off? certain topics are under-represented, so let's lower the representation of others to match? why not leave the content alone, and add new content for the under-represented areas, even if they're just stubs (might entice new editors familiar in those topics)? --[[User:Dak|Dak]] ([[User talk:Dak|talk]]) 03:50, 13 January 2009 (UTC)