Talk:Bill Fairclough

Article style

This article deviates from the established style of this website significantly:- for example, it is very long, lacks standard sections of subsections, contains repeated information and is the language is more promotional than encyclopaedic. It is also maintained by the Wikispooks community, rather than "The Burlington Files Limited". One quick way to bring this in line withWikispooks:Policy would be to move it to user:DoubleAgent, where Bill could adjust it as he saw fit. That is a main function of a user page, after all. -- Robin (talk) 19:33, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

The duplication of information referred to at the start of the piece has been addressed and the statements about the role of The Burlington Files Limited have been significantly curtailed and modified as suggested. Ignoring the short synopsis which is obviously partially repetitive, we could find no material unintentional duplications in the rest of the text. As for style, of the many bios we read prior to releasing versions of this, there are literally hundreds of biographical styles and few are anywhere near genuinely encyclopaedic! Furthermore, being encyclopaedic does not lend itself to being easy or attractive to read. -- DoubleAgent (talk) 10:54, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Wikispooks style is the appropriate style in this case. This is very terse, includes sections (with '==' marks - look at the source of other pages if you are in doubt) and emphasises links to other pages. Special:LongPages informs me that this is the longest of the main: namespace pages. Readers will always be able to read the full version at User:DoubleAgent. So have a think about which page pieces would be good to move to subpages. See 9-11 if you're not sure what subpages are. Also please sign your comments on talk pages (i.e. use "-- ~~~~" at the end of your comments). -- Robin (talk) 13:46, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

UPDATED We think that maintaining a suite of such sub-pages (with the potential for others to alter them) would be too onerous for us. Accordingly, we have reduced the page by some 20,000 words and updated the DoubleAgent user page with the text from this page as it was. We will assume this is acceptable unless we hear from you.

Further to your amendments we have made further substantial changes and in particular would draw your attention to Noes 1 and 2. -- DoubleAgent (talk) 11:57, 9 March 2019 (UTC)