Benefits Of Demerging Stuff Instead Of Merging Endlessly

Summary

A page is like a class (in an OO language): it should say one thing and say it well (JonathanTang)
Often, valuable information is buried in a very long page. By demerging that information, it will become available to all.
We use hyper-links all the time. See this page, see that page. The user won't be spending 25 minutes to find the info referred; he'll get fed-up right before. We live in a time of here and now. Most people don't have the patience to go through a million words to find what they are looking for. If they don't find it in the first 2 minutes, they "change channels", they "zip"
10 5 K pages occupy as much space as one 50 K page
Long pages with a lot of subjects quickly become illegible. The idea is not to refactor them and chop off 9/10s of its information. The idea is to keep all the info but to demerge the info. '''We can always write a summary on the top of every page so this way a page will have the best of both worlds: a section written in document mode and another one written in thread mode.
A lot of unrelated material is often very interesting. Why not keep it and make it the subject of a new page?
Wikis are not made to hold long pages. Word processors are. The fundamental use of wiki is to have an instant access to very small pages.
Long pages discourage writers. They have the feeling they are contributing material to a filled-out dump and they'll shy away from writing on such pages.

Presentation

The main problem here is we are concentrating all kinds of information on a few pages. Some zealous curators only have the word merge on their keyboard so all they do is merge stuff into bigger and bigger pages.

Of course DeMerging? is important. A page is like a class (in an OO language): it should say one thing and say it well. There is nothing wrong with ShortPage?s, and in fact they often are easier to read than long ones.

The advantage of merging is that it makes apparent duplication that would often be scattered throughout the Wiki. Once pages have been merged, comments within them can be rearranged to place related ideas together. Once comments are grouped by topics, it becomes obvious that the same thing has been said three or four times. This can be distilled into a single statement that contains all the information of the original.

Merging also facilitates categorization. When I'm refactoring pages, I almost always find out that my initial idea for an organization scheme is deeply flawed. New strands of commonality pop out of existing threads; comments that I thought would make good categories turn out to be mere details of other topics. But these commonalities don't pop out until all the material is sitting there in front of you.

Once the page has been organized and converted to DocumentMode, then it can be split off and de-merged into subtopics. The resulting organization should hopefully be far better than the original, because you can see ideas emerge from the discussion.

As a nice side-effect, the page becomes much easier to refer to. The subpages can be given MeaningfulNames that might actually be the target of AccidentalLinking themselves, and the organization reflects the content that actually exists rather than your idea of what might be useful to people.

-- JonathanTang

Everyone on wiki likes smaller pages. That's not at issue. The so-called 'deletomaniacs' aren't saying that we should have a few long pages. They're saying that the information on the pages they're deleting already exists on the other page. Redundant information is widely considered no good. Read OnceAndOnlyOnce. Oh, and please don't use strawman arguments. They are for me just unbearable!

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