User:SolKarma

Why are you so fixated on hard disk drives? And why are you repeating the same information on multiple pages?

SolKarma replies Simply this: an encyclopedia is a like a thesaurus, a collection of entries and their descriptions. This is how humans categorize knowledge. To better categorize knowledge, one must contain elements of knowledge into their most discrete form.

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You are severely mistaken about the nature of encyclopedias, the nature of this wikipedia and the best way to archive knowledge for users' retrieval and access.

As Uriyan says, encyclopedias have full articles, not nodes. The wikipedia has a search facility so that if a user searches for something in an article entry, they will be able to find it. You do not need to put all the keywords you can think of into separate entries.

Also, splitting everything up by nodes like that is extremely detrimental to the user. Having to navigate through the wikipedia costs user time and mental resources. If a user has to go back and forth across two dozen different entries to understand a single, simple idea, then those entries are completely useless.

The best way to present information to the user is one screenful at a time. That way they have as much information as possible at one glance and can see how all of that information interrelates. When entries are much longer than a screenful, the user wastes time scrolling through the entry. When entries are smaller, they waste time clicking on links.

Also, putting related links in the same article (like object oriented programing, and object oriented programing language) just to shorten the path between nodes is another bad idea. The cost of the shortened path is that each article ends up having more links, which end up confusing the user.

A special case of avoiding such out-linking redundancy is to avoid linking the same term multiple times closely together. So if operating system is already linked in a paragraph, avoid linking it a second time. Unless the occurences of a term are separated by at least a half-screenful, creating additional links just clutters the page.

These customs are all developed in order to aid the reader's ability to reflect on what they're reading, instead of mindlessly travelling along a chain of nodes.

Wikipedia is not a thesaurus (look at Most common Wikipedia faux pas!), and in no way must it split knowledge into a discrete form. On the contrary, it should be as complete as possible, and in order to be that, it should integrate significant chunks of related facts into a single article. Of course, an article should not generally include unrelated topics - but "primary partition" and "logical partition" are hardly unrelated. Also, articles like "Drive letter assignment" (and many others) are excessively DOS-centric. For instance, Linux does not give a damn whether a partition is primary or secondary, and so do the newer NTs (to a lesser extent).

--Uriyan