Talk:Extraordinary rendition/Archive 2

message: Erroneous rendition should be merged with extraordinary rendition, since eroneous or not, it remains ER. Besides, this title suggests that if it is not erroneous it is acceptable and legal, which it definitely is not! Nomen NescioGnothi seauton 08:47, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What exactly is the difference between the two concepts, apart from suggesting that erroneous means innocent civilians are subject to ER? Nomen NescioGnothi seauton 10:16, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Erroneous renditions would all be extraordinary renditions, but only those that someone in authority in the US Government is willing to consider were done in error.  --  Geo Swan 23:03, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I still do not understand, if this is a subcategory of ER, why can't it be discussed in the original article? Nomen NescioGnothi seauton 08:16, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

text: This users first edit was this comment. Nomen NescioGnothi seauton 08:17, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

text: I don't see the justification for this being a separate article. It certainly shouldn't use an ad-hoc term like "erroneous renditions" -- which is arguably propaganda, as another point of view might have it that they were illegal renditions (although rendition in all forms is technically extralegal). I think this article needs to define what it's about better, if it isn't to be merged. --Dhartung | Talk 20:57, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge

message: I continue to think that a merge and redirection is a mistake.
What is the difference between an "extraoridinary rendition" and an "erroneous rendition"?  An erroneous rendition is one that even the CIA is prepared to consider may be in error.  To some who think that all extraordinary renditions are an outrage that might seem like no distinction at all.  But, many people think that extraordinary renditions are perfectly okay.
In general, smaller, more focussed, articles are more useful for readers, and better reflect the non-hierarchical nature of human knowledge.
More useful because when you  follow the link, you are taken directly to the information you want.  Whereas, if the article that contains the information you want, gets merged and redirected to another article, the reader has to wade through that article, looking for the pieces of intormation they want.  
Not nice.  I anticipate that a lot of times new readers don't bother, they just decide that the wikipedia is not that useful after all.
More dangerously, editors who have no interest in the topic of the original, small, focussed article may start to monkey with it, or decide the newly merged information is "off-topic", and excise it altogether.  That leaves the now useless redirect redirecting readers hungry for knowledge to an article that won't actually tell them anything they want to know.
Also not nice.
Then, let's add in a name change.  Now, a reader can at least guess what the relation between the link they clicked on "erroneous rendition" redirected to "extraordinary rendition".  But the titles of articles do get changed.  Add in another merge, or some other reason why extraordinary rendition should gets its name changed, on the reader who clicked on "erroneous rendition" will have no idea why they ended up where they ended up.
Let me offer a related example.  There is a big article on PT Barnum and a small article on the phrase There is a sucker born every minute.  Some bright spark nominated the smaller article for deletion.  When I used google to check on web-pages that used the phrase I found over fifty percent didn't say anything, one way or another about PT Barnum.  Meaning that if the redirection had gone ahead readers who turned to the wikipedia for an explanation of this idiom would be redirected to a biography.
Through this discussion I discovered one of the wikipedia's most serious weaknesses.  There is no central place devoted to a sober, civil discussion of the wikipedia's general layout.  So contributors fight out battles over competing wikipedia designs on talk pages and afd pages, where the issues never get fully explored and tested.
Ted Nelson, the American visionary who first coined the term hypertext, anticipated the struggle we would have over attempts by authors to impose their sense of order over an essentially unordered universe of human knowledge.  Hierarchies of knowledge are all arbitrary Nelson argued - convincingly IMO.  A hypertext encyclopedia should allow readers to find their own path through the network of human knowledge, without regard to whether their preferred path matches up with somebody else's idea of how ideas should be connected.
Paper documents are inherently linear.  It is in the nature of text.  Even so, paper documents improvised crude mechanisms to allow us to branch.  Marginal notations, captions, parenthetical comments, footnotes are among the techniques users of paper documents used to try to recognize there was more than one branch readers could follow through the universe of human knowledge.  But on a rich, hypertexted system like the wikipedia there is no excuse for this.
Still "mergists" try to shoehorn the knowledge in the wikipedia into  the hierarchies they choose, as if wikipedia articles were still confined to paper.  IMO not useful, wasteful, and - really - disrespectful to the readers.  meta:wiki is not paper.  --  Geo Swan 19:51, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  No merge