Three Separate Articles? Edit

I cannot be the only one who thinks splitting this into three different articles is a good idea, am I?TIEPilot051999 06:46, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

• Probably, but I don't share that opinion. I think multiple editions of the same work should all be in the same place (I said a little about it here, even though I explicitly mentioned this page as a possible exception). jSarek 01:13, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Okay, right or wrong, I split them. Since jSarek's already asked me about it, I'll tell everyone what I told him:

Somebody had already created a page for the first edition so we had two articles already. Bearing that in mind, and that the article which was supposed to cover all three was basically about the second edition (listing its contents but not the others), we could have either merged the first edition stuff into it or split it out into individual editions. I figured that having three massive contents lists in the one article (and you said it yourself, the contents changed a lot between editions) would be making the whole article huge and not very easy to follow. Therefore, at the risk of being unpopular, and since the first edition had already been done, I thought that splitting the other two was the best move.

Generally speaking though, I think jSarek's right that having one article is best, with a list of changes between versions. If you want to go that way, we can merge everything back together, but since it basically all changed from the first to the second editions the list of changes would be very big. I think this works better as an exception (like The Essential Chronology and the New Essential Chronology, two editions of the same book which are basically complete rewrites).

If everybody thinks that they're better off together, that's fine, we can just copy the three articles back into this one, splitting them under appropriate headings and keep the others as redirects. Either way, a lot of work was needed to make this a better article, by not just focusing on the second edition. Green Tentacle ^(Talk) 11:12, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

• Well, I wish I could find the original arguments we had over merging separate editions of the same book into the same article way back when, but I can't, so here's my basic opinion. Books with the same title (thus not including the various New Essential Guides and their antecedents) should be on the same page, so it's easy for people looking for information on a book to see that there are different versions available and to compare the differences. It also makes citation easier, since people normally don't distinguish between editions in articles, and figuring out which cite was correct after the fact is problematic. The various versions of these books *might* warrant an exception due to how different they are, but it should be an exception, certainly not a rule. jSarek 11:27, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Right, as an alternative I've done a little test page of how they could be merged with general information at the top, a separate section on each edition covering specific details of each one (though we've only got stuff for the first at the moment, publisher's summaries at least should be easy to come by) and then contents below. Doing the contents is the tricky part if you want one article. I doubt anybody really wants three huge lists so we either do a big list for the first edition, then a list of new articles for the subsequent ones or something like what I tried here which shows at a glance which editions articles came in and how they changed, though the idea would need some refinement and would be a lot of work. Finally, we haven't actually got a list of the contents for the third edition so we'd need that. Green Tentacle ^(Talk) 12:17, 5 December 2006 (UTC)