User talk:Lotero3

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Hello, Lotero3, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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Japan Society (Manhattan)
Hi, I saw that you added a very lengthy list of exhibitions to the article on the Japan Society in Manhattan. I've removed this for the time being for a few reasons, which I will go into below:


 * The first is that an exhaustive list of all exhibitions would be considered to be too much indiscriminate detail for Wikipedia's purposes. The issue here is that an organization of this type will likely have dozens to potentially hundreds of exhibitions, as they've been open and hosting exhibitions for quite a long time. There's also the question of repetition, as some exhibitions may reoccur.


 * The second is that a list like this doesn't really impart a lot of information in a way that shows their importance. It shows that they existed and were held, but it doesn't say anything about them or their importance. As such, very notable exhibitions will be lost amid other exhibitions that gained less attention from media outlets, critics, and scholarly sources. Basic lists of exhibitions are things that are typically things that could be found on the organization website fairly easily, going back to the first bullet point.


 * Large lists may also pose an issue for people coming in on cellphones, although this is more of an issue with far larger lists and tables.

My recommendation here would be to create a prose section about the history of exhibitions at the museum. For example, a history text about the society may show that the earlier records of exhibitions were wiped out in a fire, which would be good to add (this is a random scenario that has happened with organizations and museums in the past). Or it may be that the exhibitions were sporadic until X year, when added funding enabled the society to hire someone to manage exhibitions full-time and as such, hold them more routinely. Things like that would be good to have.

As far as individual exhibitions, instead of listing all of them, it would be better to focus more specifically on the notable ones that gained independent coverage. So for another example, if a very, very notable Japanese artist exhibited artwork at the society and gained a lot of coverage, as well as achieving landmark attendance, that would be good to include as opposed to an exhibition that gained no independent coverage and had relatively mediocre attendance. (All places of this type will have exhibitions like that.) If there are specific exhibition wings, that would be good to include in the section as well. Something like this is kind of what I was thinking of, although the section should be better sourced and organized than the section on that page. I'll try to find a better example for you.

Now all of that said, you do have an excellent idea here - too many museum and organization articles don't have sections on exhibition history, so you definitely pinpointed an important information gap on Wikipedia that needs to be filled. Well done on spotting that! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:46, 24 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I found some other examples of an exhibition section here, here, and here. Now there are some articles that include lists to a degree, but they do limit them to specifics, namely to exhibitions that focus on notable individuals or artwork that has received coverage in independent reliable sources. You can see those here and here. These are all of Good Article status, so they're definitely good to use as a reference for the section. Let me know if you need any help - this really sounds like an interesting topic! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:54, 24 September 2019 (UTC)