Talk:Stratification (water)

Content about lakes too long

I think the content about lakes is too long and should be replaced with an excerpt from lake stratification. Similar to how I have just done it for ocean stratification. The advantage is that in future, updates have to be made only to one article, not to two. A change in the lead of lake stratification would then automatically be reflected here. EMsmile (talk) 14:12, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

P.S. for this to work well, the lead of lake stratification should be made longer (4 paragraphs, around 500-600 words), or the excerpt could instead be taken from the definition section with this command:

{{excerpt|Lake stratification#Definition|paragraphs=1-3|file=no}} EMsmile (talk) 14:14, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

EMsmile, I do not agree. I think the content of the articles and the summary sections may start out the same but should be allowed to diverge to suit their purposes best, which is not the purpose of transcluding excerpts, which is intended for when the content is intended to remain identical. I am not going to edit war over this, but also not going to contribute further to this article. I have other things to do where I am unlikely to be overriden without prior discussion, Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 14:37, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

What you call "to be overriden without prior discussion" I call WP:BOLD, i.e. I boldly made an edit to an existing article, yes. I think you are referring to this edit of mine. I didn't think it would be controversial as I replaced a paragraph that you had copied from ocean stratification with an excerpt from ocean stratification. This way, if someone changes the lead of ocean stratification in future, the same change would be reflected here. I then went to the talk page to suggest to do the same for the section on "lake stratification", i.e. to use an excerpt from lake stratification. Not everyone likes excerpts as much as I do, sure. But that is just personal preference, no need to get all stroppy with the person who is suggesting to use an excerpt instead of either copied or new/diverging text.

Maybe your vision for this article is different to mine. My vision, which is based on the prior move discussion, was that we make our lives easy and set it up like a glorified disambiguation page. That means, content that exists in the two sub-articles (lake, ocean), is not reworked from scratch but short summaries are used for those sections. In my opinion such short summaries are ideally done with excerpts. Other water bodies that don't have sub-articles yet can be fleshed out in more detail (rives, caves, estuaries). Anyway if you and I don't agree on this, let's hear the opinions of some of the others who were involved in the move discussion, e.g. User:Cyfal, User:Rotideypoc41352, User:Epipelagic.

And I also don't plan to get too involved in this article or sink a lot of time into it as I think it's not all that important and will likely linger at low pageviews. The more important article for me personally is ocean stratification as this is something that humans are influencing and changing through our CO2 emissions which cause warming and a more stratified ocean. EMsmile (talk) 09:56, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

I would prefer using excerpts. My idea is that each section should give informations for a specific body of water as oceans, lakes, flooded caves etc. If the text in such a section is not an excerpt of the specific article, that means there are informations given in "Stratification (water)" that are not given in the specific article – and I can't see a reason for that. --Cyfal (talk) 22:09, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

• The first issue is whether the section on lakes should contain anything fundamentally different from the article on lake stratification. I don't see any reason why it should.
• The second issue is whether the excerpt function, as it is currently implemented, offers an adequate mechanism for extracting and maintaining the needed summary information. It does not. The editor who programmed this potentially very valuable function made an excellent first pass at implementing it, but the implementation needs further refinements. I have mentioned this matter in the past, but the appropriate discussion has not taken place.

The status quo on Wikipedia is that busibodies looking for people to cancel, specialists obsessively focused on trivia, control-obsessed administrators, and virtue-signalling social networkers infest and dominate the notice boards. Committed content builders have no place at the table, and input from them is dismissed and demeaned, including input on issues such as specifying the utilities that would really be useful for content building. This is a major reason why competent long term content builders are now all but extinct on Wikipedia. — Epipelagic (talk) 09:40, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

I think the excerpt tool is here to stay in Wikipedia and will likely be improved over time. I think it makes editing more efficient, as one only has to update the content in one article (the source article) and not in the others where it might be transcribed. But for this article here, how about a compromise suggestion: neither an excerpt nor any copied text blocks nor original new text for lakes and oceans but simply an annotated link. I think this would solve the problem and also reduce time required for editing this article. I've implemented my idea for the ocean section and would do it in the same way for the lakes section unless there is opposition to my suggestion? EMsmile (talk) 15:28, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

EMsmile, In what way does an annotated link provide the reader with a high level summary of the relevant information in this article? It is even less appropriate than a transcluded excerpt.
A high level page should not be "a glorified disambiguation page", it should be a comprehensive article in its own right, capable of eventually becoming a featured article, and serving as an introduction to the broader topic to readers who may not need the detail of the subsidiary main articles, while providing the links for those who do. Excerpts are a relatively crude way of doing this, and do not allow adjustment over time to suit the different application of the content, which is not always the same for a lead and a summary section, and while they have their place, this is not it. A copied block of content is also a fairly crude method to create a section, but it is quick and allows later improvement to suit the article without side effects, and leaves editors free to optimise the content of both articles without concern for keeping it suitable for both. Epipelagic, I would appreciate your take on this point. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 05:40, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Hello, and hope everyone's doing well. I do not mean this as a value judgment and speak only from the common understanding that we are all volunteers and naturally have different priorities for how we would or would not like to spend our time here on enwp. Per an earlier comment, EMSmile do[es]n't plan to get too involved in this article or sink a lot of time into it as...[t]he more important article for [them] personally is ocean stratification. My questions are, then:

1. Pbsouthwood, I inferred from your comments at Talk:Ocean stratification#Requested move 1 February 2023 that you not only had the desire but also access to the literature for bringing this broad concept article to a start class-level at least. With paywalls, I consider this to be especially valuable. Would you be willing to reconsider your decision above to not...contribute further to this article?
2. If Pbsouthwood is willing to write and expand a broad-concept article, how strongly do the rest of us feel about this article? Speaking for myself, if I wanted to minimize time spent on this article and its associated discussions (and I do), I'd hand the keys to someone who wants to and can do the job and leave their work and its details to them. Hence, my lack of a response before this.

As a tangent, I used an excerpt from the RSV vaccine article in the RSV article as a time saver. A student working on the article for a course replaced the excerpt with text, citing medical reliable sources. I personally thought that was an improvement and fit better with the rest of the article, which the student had also improved and brought in line with enwp policies and guidelines.

Please excuse the length. If I need to clarify something, please feel free to ask. Thanks for reading! Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 21:55, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Rotideypoc41352, All regular mainspace articles should have the potential to become featured articles. It is one of the principles on which the encyclopedia is built. This is not required or expected to happen immediately or even soon. There are exceptions such as disambiguation pages, redirects and list articles, but this is not one of those.
I was willing to produce content to at least start class, possibly C-class at this stage, since this is a high level article. That implies that I would create the obvious sections and put in enough content to be useful, and to serve as a useful foundation for anyone else who wants to improve the article at any time, but not necessarily actually create a featured article directly, as I do not even know if I have access to the necessary sources (probably do not). This implies using content that is amenable to improvement in that way. Your use of an excerpt as a time saver and the student replacing it with better direct content is entirely within the policies and guidelines, as both were steps towards a better article. This was the reverse. It added no better content, and made it more difficult for most editors to improve. Does this answer your questions? Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 05:13, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

If we come to an agreement on what the content of the page should include, and if that complies with policy and guidance, I will get the page as far as I can with the sources I can easily access and without it interfering with other work. This may not happen immediately, but if anyone has good accessible sources, they can list them here or just add reliably sourced content directly. Similarly if anyone thinks some of the content is excessive, please discuss on the talk page what you think should be removed, and why. Bold edits should always comply with policy and guidance when removing properly sourced content. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:16, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Like Rotideypoc41352, I'm somewhat agnostic on this issue and would rather not help with writing the article. So I don't feel entitled to comment. Still, it seems to me a disambiguation page may be sufficient. An overview article is needed if the issue of stratification in water bodies is not simply the sum of the separate sub-articles. That would mean there are significant issues that cannot be dealt with in a natural way in the sub-articles. If Peter Southwood feels he can find sufficient material like that to warrant a stand-alone article, then of course he should just go for it. Those actions will speak all that needs to be said for his position. If it turns out the new material can still be adequately broken down into component sub-articles, then that's still a win. The overview article can just be dispersed again to the component articles, and everything will be that much clearer.

A couple of asides. Peter feels overview articles should be capable of developing into substantial articles in their own right. But maybe sometimes something between a substantial article and a disambiguation page is called for. For example, the stratification (water) article could just briefly characterise the differences between things like what principally causes stratification in lakes (temperature), estuaries (salinity) and the ocean (diverse). The article Estuarine water circulation could perhaps be expanded and renamed something like Stratification in estuaries. More could be said on mixing and stratification as rivers move into estuaries and estuaries move into the ocean, extending to spill-over down the continental slopes. — Epipelagic (talk) 09:49, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Epipelagic, thanks for your comments, they may be more helpful than you had expected. They have reminded me of the strategy I had in mind for the article when I started working on it, and which subsequently was derailed by events, which was to gather together all the relevant information on the types and mechanisms of stratification in water as summaries from other articles, then separate out the general physics for handling in one section with subsections as needed for salinity, temperature etc., which would leave the summary sections linking to subsidiary articles like lakes and ocean smaller and more specific. I do not have a blueprint laid out, and the final structure would emerge and develop according to what is found to be available, as this in not a field in which I am sufficiently expert to be able to plan very far ahead. This would require the content to actually be in the article so it can be moved around as needed, and would be compatible with random editors adding relevant statemnts, as they can be moved around without affecting attribution once they are in the article. This cannot easily be done with transcluded excerpts. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 13:11, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

This all sounds good; it was an interesting and friendly discussion, thanks. I'll take this article off my watchlist now and have a look back in perhaps 6-12 months time to see what came out of it. So no more interference from my side, just go ahead with what you'd like to do, Peter Southwood. I liked the comments by Rotideypoc41352 and Epipelagic, especially this one resonated with me: An overview article is needed if the issue of stratification in water bodies is not simply the sum of the separate sub-articles. That would mean there are significant issues that cannot be dealt with in a natural way in the sub-articles.. It seems that the topic is more complex that I originally anticipated so I am happy to bow out and leave it to others to continue the work on this article. Myself, I will focus on ocean stratification as my principal area of interest with respect to water stratification. EMsmile (talk) 14:25, 27 February 2023 (UTC)