User:Wtshymanski/parts

Essay in draft: Wikipedia is not a parts catalog (WP:PARTS)

Parts lists are easy and fun to do.

Parts lists don't belong in an encyclopedia.

Parts lists cause problems for the Encyclopedia.

A parts list, by its narrow and context-less nature, is the very opposite of an encyclopedia article.

Wikipedia should contain no parts lists.

Wikipedia is not a parts catalog.

Encyclopedia articles should be concise, authoritative, comprehensive and accurate overviews of a topic (well, "accurate" is a loaded term on Wikipedia, we must say "verifiable"), not a blizzard of uncorrelated facts. A parts list doesn't give an overview of the subject, and rarely gives any explanation of why the parts differ or why they were used.

A good encyclopedia article about lamp sockets would tell you "how" and "why" and "when" each lamp socket development came about. A list of parts gives no explanation of why the parts differ. There's no historical context to explain the technical and commercial factors that gave rise to the plethora of parts. There's no indication of the sequence of development.

We don't need an "article" on every single size of flashlight battery ever known. We don't need even more articles full of tripe like " A 0.5 in (1/2 inch) bolt (IPA [boɫt]) (UK english: bolt)is smaller than a 3/4 inch bolt but bigger than a 1/4 inch (0.063500 m) bolt; a 15/32 inch (0.46875 in) bolt is nearly the same size. All dimensions must be measured at non-relativistic speeds. Bolt technologies such as metals such as iron, steel, brass, aluminium or non-metals such as nylon (and rivets and screws and tape and nails) may or may not be utilized to hold things together such as metal parts of structures. Nicholas Tesla invented the bolt in 1893. Other places that use bolts include automobiles, and the bus stop at the end of my street. In England a hand tool called a wrench (known to laypersons colloquially as a "wrench") is technically known as a spanner. As of the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century, most countries use metric dimensions for bolts. You must always turn a bolt clockwise to tighten it, but some bolts tighten in the anticlockwise direction. Make sure you have proper footware on when working with bolts. You can buy the best bolts at www.boltworld.com." and similar dreadful tedious mind-deadening unsourced rubbery platitudinous garbage that is embarrassing to read.

Un-notable transistors and diodes
The Notability guideline requires multiple independent sources with significant coverage of the topic. Sources should be secondary and independent, that is, not publicity by the manufacturers of the parts concerned. Sources should be significant, that is, not just a mention in passing or one-line statement, but some volume of discussion on the part.

What Wikipedia is not says that Wikipedia is not a general collection of all the world's information, but is an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is a reference work containing a summary of knowledge in one or several fields - it is an overview, not an exhaustive listing of every possible fact.

An article about a semiconductor device must contain more than a recitation of the specifications from an unreferenced data sheet. Otherwise, it's not an article but an entry on a parts catalog. Ideally an article would contain "who, what, when, where, why, how" information. Which company invented or developed the device, when it was invented or registered with JEDEC or other authority, was it always a JEDEC part number or did it have a proprietary ancestor, why was it considered necessary to develop the part, what technology does the part use, how does it compare to similar devices available at the time. To assess significance, how many companies make the part, how many parts are or were sold in a typical year, is the part still currently available? What products made significant use of the part? What was made possible when this part was released, that couldn't be done as well or at all before it was released?

Is the part significant in some way? Is it the first/the last/the biggest/the smallest/the most powerful/the fastest/the quietest device of its kind? Does the part have some relevance outside the narrow world of (hobby) electronics? Why was this part popular, and just how popular was it?

The problem with the above sort of information and writing an actual article about a semiconductor, instead of a parts list entry, is that sources are not available to hobbyist editors on-line and for no cost. Even if someone who edits here was working for Fairchild or General Electric or Motorola or RCA or Westinghouse at the time, their private experiences count as "original research" or primary sources at best, and lack independence. The marketing decisions that lead to the manufacture of many of these devices are locked in the 40- and 50-year old files of various companies many of whom are defunct or merged. There seems to be a few overview books of the history of the semiconductor business that show up on Google Books, but they rarely spend much space on individual devices.

Some would argue "Give it time, there is no deadline". Many of these items have existed for years with no improvements, owing to the factors described above. These factors are not going to get better with time. Even though Wikipedia data storage space is indefinite and large, the amount of human effort required to maintain articles and to read them must be considered. We're wasting the readers' time with recitation of specifications that can be more reliably gotten from manufacturer's catalogs. It's not the mission of an encyclopedia to catalog every minute technological artifact. An encyclopedia is not a parts substitution manual.

Easy fun
Many Wiki contributors seem to be happy to type in pages and pages of catalog information. It improves the edit count and bulks up the page count of the encyclopedia, and is much much easier than writing text that actually explains anything. It's very easy to pick up a catalog, type in 20 different catalog numbers, and pat yourself on the back saying "I contributed to the encyclopedia!". Some people apparently like formatting big colorful tables that look like their favorite printed parts catalogs. Parts list articles are easy to generate automatically. Of three million plus "articles", I wonder how many of them were made by bots and are only edited or read by bots.

Problems caused
You can't trust a Wikipedia list to be complete and accurate, so it's not useful as a directory of things. It's just a big dumb list that gives no idea of why its members are important. Such lists are always dull to read. They waste space. They are over-specialized for a general interest encyclopedia. Inclusion of parts lists negatively affects the credibility of Wikipedia because they are untrustworthy, and because they are visible signs of a lazy attitude toward creating articles with content.

Parts lists take up a lot of space. Yes, Wikipedia is not paper, but long cumbersome lists of parts are hard to view, hard to use, hard to edit, hard to verify, and mindlessly easy to vandalize undetectably.

It's not computer resources we need to worry about conserving, it's the reader's time, and the time and effort of the editors. We waste the reader's time with masses of uninterpreted data that doesn't explain their significance.

If an article starts to list commercial catalogs, sources, and suppliers, it will rapidly degenerate into a list of spamlinks.

Not every fact belongs
An encyclopedia doesn't have to contain copies of all information. No matter how useful an exhaustive parts list would be to someone repairing or collecting the item, it's not sufficient justification for inclusion in an encyclopedia. Facts are stupid things, we need context and analysis, not just ghits. Part numbers are not notable by themselves, so a list of part numbers needs some further justification to make it notable.

Listing every Lego block ever made is not the mission of an encyclopedia. Enthusiast Web sites can afford to specialize in that low level of detail. Wikipedia has external links to direct the interested reader to such sites. A listing of every possible minor variation in color, size and features is of value and interest to a collector, but tells the general encyclopedia reader very little that is useful about Lego.

Not an encyclopedia article
An encyclopedia article should have an overview of knowledge, not a recitation of trivial numbers. A parts list is not an article, it doesn't explain the subject matter. A list of parts does not illuminate the subject. Encyclopedia articles should talk about fundamental principles of a topic.

We don't care about the pin diameters and shapes for wall plugs, but we care more about why the Americans, Germans, Britons, and Italians all came up with different ways of doing the same job. An article about automotive lamp types should discuss the the purpose and function of lamps, the various regulatory approaches, the notable chronology of technology and technique. It should not be the list of currently approved lamp types copied from a catalog. It's much more difficult to bestir oneself to the library and check out some dusty tome on automotive engineering that discusses *why* we have different lamps, what the operating differences are that lead to different US and German, British, Japanese... standards, find relevant authorities, summarize what two or three authorities have said, and so forth.

Wikipedia is not a phone book, an auto parts catalog, a chemical products catalog, or a commercial radionuclide catalog. Nor is Wikipedia a directory of international standards.

Listing relevant international standards documents is easy, and vacuous ( we can get that from a Google search). Explaining why the international standards differ, and what brought about those differences - is much more difficult, but much better content for an article.

Individual part numbers are (very nearly) never notable on their own, and so we don't need a proliferation of articles on individual lamps or batteries, or transistors, diodes, or integrated circuits.



Present situation and proposed remedy
We have such abominations as List of 7400 series integrated circuits, articles on individual numbered asteroids (7528 Huskvarna being my bête noire; no-one has taken up my facetious suggestions for usefully expanding this article), articles on individual flashlight batteries and cell phones. There's lists of bus-stops, lists of randomly-selected patents, characters from crudely-animated cable TV programs designed for stoners up at 3AM, and way too much on inexplicably popular Japanese pop-culture exports. In spite of not being an indiscriminate collection of information, we have a lot of very sketchy items here.

I dread the arrival of Category:IP addresses. After all, an IP address is a useful and notable thing to write about, it's verifiable, and its ever so easy to look up without lifting your butt from the chair behind the keyboard. I can imagine the arguments at AfD: ''Is not Wikipedia the compendium of all facts? What if all the DNS servers went down and only Wikipedia survived to allow us to look up IP addresses? What about poor people who don't have access to expensive DNS and use the Wikipedia as their only source of information? ''

Being a parts list is not a speedy deletion criterion... but it should be. We ought not to allow the parts-catalog and train-spotting lists to be included at all; they are fundamentally trivial, ephemeral, and don't explain anything.

I would like the declaration "Wikipedia is not a parts catalog." in What Wikipedia is not.