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 | This page in a nutshell: (watch this apace) |
Since wp:NYRM2017 I have done a lot of thinking about Primary Topic, and had two major changes of direction. The second is at least as important as the first and possibly more so, in that without the second, the first was a complete dead end in my (current) opinion.
The first was that Primary Topic seemed to be doing more harm than good, and that this was because two seemingly obvious propositions were in fact false. Most notably, I formed the opinion that having an article at an ambiguous base name does not in general make it easier to find. Rather, I decided that it never makes it significantly easier to find, and often makes it significantly harder. Which challenged my thinking considerably, because it meant that many article moves that I had supported or performed had in fact damaged Wikipedia, however slightly.
So, I put some time into developing a proposal to fix this. It turned into something of a monster, but as I became more and more convinced that Primary Topic (as it then was) was damaging to Wikipedia, it seemed something that was necessary.
But the second change of thinking was equally dramatic. It particularly seemed a shame to disambiguate the article on mathematics. That was in a painful way betraying the love of my life. There seemed no other way forward. And then suddenly there was.
And perhaps there will be a third epiphany. Watch this space.