Lumper vs. Splitter: Difference between revisions
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{{Useful Notes}} |
{{Useful Notes}} |
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{{quote|''"It is good to have hair-splitters and lumpers." |
{{quote|''"It is good to have hair-splitters and lumpers."|[http://books.google.com/books?id{{=}}gHYTAAAAYAAJ&pg{{=}}PA105 Charles Darwin]''}} |
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When faced with five subtly different things, would you rather see one page with a general description of all five, or five pages precisely describing one entry each? If the first, you're a Lumper. If the second, you're a Splitter. |
When faced with five subtly different things, would you rather see one page with a general description of all five, or five pages precisely describing one entry each? If the first, you're a Lumper. If the second, you're a Splitter. |
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Revision as of 23:14, 15 August 2019
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"It is good to have hair-splitters and lumpers."
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When faced with five subtly different things, would you rather see one page with a general description of all five, or five pages precisely describing one entry each? If the first, you're a Lumper. If the second, you're a Splitter.
For example: A Splitter is someone who thinks that this page should not exist. There should be separate pages for Lumper and Splitter.
A lumper also wants to get rid of this page, but by merging it with a bunch of other pages to create a new page called Common Wiki Wars.
The way Tropers handle this deep philosophical divide is for splitters to write finely-distinct entries and for lumpers to write overview entries that list the "splits". We call those lumper pieces "indexes" or Super Tropes (and, on All The Tropes, prefer to put them into Categories), and each of the splits is a Sub-Trope.
The Other Wiki would not appreciate this. We must never tell them. The Other Wiki calls these "mergist" and "separatist" Which, you will note, is a split.