Talk:High Value Detainee

To do. Please write a brief definition or description of this article at High Value Detainee/Definition.

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Should this article be kept or deleted?

Should this article be kept or deleted?

Pat tagged this article for deletion with the edit summary "PropDel, if appears at all in this wiki, should be in the George W. Bush article"

Wow. I couldn't disagree more strongly with this approach.

IMO, the power of wikis does not lie in the raw information they contain, but in how that information is linked together.

IMO, shoehorning information that has enough references for a standalone article into larger articles is a huge disservice to readers.

Yes, the information in this article is linked to George W. Bush. But it is ALSO linked to articles on a whole bunch of other topics, black sites, Global War on terror, human rights, the US Supreme Court, and to the article on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and every other individual who is classed as a high value detainee.

Some people argue that this issue is "fixed" by making a Frankenstein wikilinks to George W. Bush#High Value Detainee. However, IMO, this kind of link should NEVER be used in article space. The WMF software has NEVER fully supported these Frankenstein wikilinks. They don't show up properly on a contributor's watchlist. They don't show up properly on when someone clicks on the what links here button.

They just don't work. Plus they represent a constant danger that someone, not realizing that a subsection heading within an article is the destination of a Frankenstein wikilink, will have no idea they shouldn't copy-edit that subsection heading. Any change to the subsection heading, even trivial changes to punctuation, spelling, or capitalization, silently breaks the link. This means that a reader, thinking they are going to an article on high value detainees, instead ends up at the very top of the George W. Bush article, with no idea how or why they got there.

That is a very bad thing.

It is even worse if a good faith editor boldly removes the entire subsection, or moves it into an article where they think it is more relevant.

Almost 20 years ago I started a wikipedia article on the famous phrase "There is a sucker born every minute". A well-meaning person was adamant this phrase should be better covered in a subsection of the article on P.T. Barnum. This was a mistake for several reasons.

1. Barnum never coined this phrase. An enemy of his falsely attributed it to him.
2. There were several variants to the wording of this phrase, representing a real risk that if the article was shoehorned, inappropriately, the Barnum article, and replaced with a redirect, a good faith person could come along and change the subsection name, breaking the link.

I spent a couple of hours looking at the google hits when one searched for this phrase. About one third of the references that repeated this phrase claimed PT Barnum coined it. Another third correctly merely said it was widely attributed to Barnum. And the final third merely used the phrase, without attempting any explanation as to where it came from. Online encyclopedias are read by lots of people for whom English is not their first language, and lots of people who grew up somewhere where they would never have heard of Barnum.

If the Frankenstein link to the section of the PT Barnum article that discusses the phrase is broken (likely) or that section has been removed, the poor reader, who thinks they are clicking on a link that will explain this catchy phrase instead ends up at any article on an old-fashioned impressario, that has nothing to do with the phrase.

So, I repeat, based on my very long experience, shoehorning information into an article on a related topic is a terrible idea. George Swan (talk) 14:21, 10 May 2024 (CDT)