The Wikipedia article on Personal information management (PIM) has been flagged for 1)possibly being "written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay" and for 2) possibly containing "an excessive amount of intricate detail that may interest only a particular audience". The article underwent an extensive revision by a panel of PIM researchers recently in 2020 and most especially to address #1. The template was removed after careful review and has continued, with only minor revisions, until now. Can you say more considering what in the article might trigger #1 and #2? Thank you. And thank you for your service. I agree Wikipedia is "the best thing ever" William (talk) 08:03, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hey @Williampauljones:. Thanks for the background on this article. I didn't see anything on the talk page before tagging it so was unaware it's been updated recently. Here's my humble thoughts, feel free to disagree and remove the tag if you think that appropriate. For #1, in my opinion most of this page reads more as an essay or a presentation than an encyclopedic entry. The more obvious examples are when the prose delves into questions and uses parenthesis to "talk to" the reader:
"Information fragmentation creates problems for each kind of PIM activity. Where to keep new information? Where to look for (re-find) information already kept?"
"Throughout a typical day, people repeatedly experience the need for information in large amounts and small (e.g., "When is my next meeting?"; "What's the status of the budget forecast?" "What's in the news today?") prompting activities to find and re-find."
In addition, there are over 40 different instances of "for example..." written on this page as a way to reiterate the main point. An encyclopedia should have made the point clear enough the first time to not have to rely on this sort of prose. It serves to make the page become overbearingly long and constantly takes away from the point. An example of an overly-long sentence with too much detail on the minutiae is the very first one in the article:
"Personal information management (PIM) is the study and implementation of the activities that people perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use informational items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages, and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related or not) and fulfill a person's various roles (as parent, employee, friend, member of community, etc.);[1][2] it is information management with intrapersonal scope."
Everything I italicized is just overly verbose and adds nothing to the understanding of PIM. My edit would be, "Personal information management (PIM) is the study and implementation of the activities that people perform in order to organize, and use informational items in their personal lives. It is information management with intrapersonal scope."
I guess overall, my thought is that this article reads more like a primary source that would have been used to create it, than an encyclopedic entry in its own right. Again, this is only my opinion, but I think it needs to be more succinct. SEMMENDINGER (talk) 14:26, 18 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
thank you for your response. We can see about making the article more succinct but there is nothing in the current article that hasn't been reviewed, published and discussed many times over including in the encyclopedic venue ELIS (Jones, William, Dinneen, Jesse David, Capra, Robert, Diekema, Anne R., & Pérez-Quiñones, Manuel A. (2017). Personal Information Management (PIM). In Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, Levine-Clark, M. and McDonald, J., Eds (4th ed.). Taylor & Francis).
I personally think a more conversational style including parenthetical examples can really help to improve an article's accessibility and comprehensibility and I struggle with Wikipedia articles on topics not in my area of expertise when they don't use these expository devices. But again we can review and modify. The one thing I'm very reluctant to do is to replace the definition of PIM. Even though I like your shorter reformulation, the current definition in the article is an outcome of a National Science Foundation sponsored workshop in 2005 (https://pim.ischool.washington.edu/pim05home.htm) involving a veritable who's who of researchers (at that time) doing work in PIM. The definition is hand-crafted from a deliberative process involving many iterations. We're not likely to assemble such a panel of PIM experts (at the same time, under the same "roof") anytime soon. The definition may be long but it has survived the test of time. William (talk) 13:19, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
p.s., with respect to the definition of PIM, one thing we might do, as we did in the ELIS article, is to offer, as paraphrase, the following:
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