Wikipedia talk:Abundance and redundancy

I don't totally agree. A user like User:172 repeatedly copied the same content from article to article, this was felt by several people (including me) as an abuse. There's a question of measure: suppressing all redundancy is bad, suppressing redundancy for the sake of tweaking the POV of an article is even worse, but copying whole paragraphs from one place to another (perhaps only indirectly related) may also a waste of resources, and here I mean mostly the intellectual resources that are devoted to improving these paragraphs in case they need to be.

This being said, I'm the "culprit" of some factual duplication between Walloon Brabant and Flemish Brabant. I didn't think and don't think that the small amount of duplicated information deserved a third article on its own; and even if it did, repetition there is kept short and doesn't harm.

--FvdP 23:50 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC)


 * I dislike redundancy, and prefer instead summary. So, for example, September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Timeline links to the more detailed timelines of the background, the day, the rest of the month, October, and the aftermath. It doesn't duplicate information in those articles, it summarises them. Martin

Yeah, Martin, but I got reamed once when I tried to re-organize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict page with a header that led to three logical periods of the conflict. Since theres so much there, I thought it would warrant that kind of depth, so each page could contain summaries within to be expanded upon on other articles, like creating a stalk that has branches off of it. 911 was done in a spirit of co-operation though, and theres a big difference. I dont really disagree with either one of you, and it doesnt seem like you disagree with me on the whole either. Is a question of degrees, and I will rephrase that part. Though, some may want to cut this article up and move sections here and there.... :) -Stevert


 * Yeah well, on Isreal vs Palestine all bets are off... ;-)
 * global warming is my next project - that'll take a while, though... Martin

Understatement of the century, Dice. Stevert

I agree with the FVD in the above and I also like the policy statement. If the redundancy is kept to a minumum.WHEELER 16:48, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Change the wording?
I believe that the sentence it is preferred to have abundance and redundancy of content should be changed to it is preferred to a certain extent to have abundance and redundancy of content. The former statement sounds too absolute in content and understanding. -- S iva1979 Talk to me  01:33, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I'd be more in favor of it is preferred to have redundance and abundance and redundancy of content but that's just me being silly.--Paul McDonald (talk) 14:03, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Demoting to Essay
I've been bold and demoted this to essay. (1) No one actually follows this as a guideline. (2) It's completely incoherent. I'm tagging it as an essay, instead. Nandesuka 12:29, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Also a very misguided essay. Anyone advocating "redundancy" on Wikipedia hasn't ever tried to clean up half a dozen scattered articles about one and the same topic, each of them equally crappy and broken. It is difficult enough to maintain one article per topic in reasonable shape. Clean WP:SS with explicit cross-links is excluded from this, of course. Summaries aren't redundancies.

You bet "redundancy" is the "solution to NPOV disputes". It is also the solution to defeat the entire purpose of this project and degrade Wikipedia to a blog host, because everyone will just be able to write their own essays about anything they please. If somebody doesn't like it, let them write their own counter-essay. This is precisely what Wikipedia is not and has never been about. You don't "solve" a problem by simply giving up on what you were doing. --dab (𒁳) 11:29, 17 July 2011 (UTC)