User talk:Mindspillage/mergism
Great essay! I agree with everything you said, and I just joined the Association.
You write: "What I don't quite understand is the opposition many people have to merging small articles into larger ones" You probably already know this, but it has become obvious to me during my 15 years on WP that the splittist tendency is due to ego, mostly that of new editors. If an editor adds a section to an existing article, he has to collaborate with the article's existing "owner" editors in writing it. If he is a newbie they often know more than he does about WP standards and often interfere or take the job away from him. If he instead creates a new article, he gets to write it himself, without interference. He also gets to list it on his brag page. Inexperienced editors face a humiliating learning curve; almost everything they write has something wrong with it and gets rewritten by more experienced editors, often with a curt edit comment. A new article is an opportunity to get out from under "supervision". His ownership and emotional investment in the new article also motivates him to fight merger attempts, regardless of how deserving. --ChetvornoTALK 07:20, 25 August 2021 (UTC)