Consider the article about the Forsaken. The second paragraph of the section "On the origins of the forsaken" - a long and well-written essay with no wiki links, terminology clarification, or subheaders - consists of this:
Only a fragment of this paragraph relates to the Forsaken. Honestly, it should be excised, summarised, and put into an article that relates to early Earth history, and the aspects which relate directly to the forsaken should be on this page. That way, a dude wondering who the Forsaken are does not have to read a long discourse on 23rd century Earth politics in order to get to the meat of the issue. Don't get me wrong, this stuff is great, but it rambles. Someone who already knows about the decline of Nationalism doesn't need the review, and someone who just wants to know about the Forsaken probably doesn't care so much.China, grown increasingly insular and denied of information and innovation from outside as it rejected the meme-trends, shielding its population from what it saw as memetic viral infections through draconian information control, was the last of the truly great Nation States. It had hidden for over two centuries behind successively more impermeable "great firewalls," each improved, ironically enough, with increasing willingness by outside expertise with mutual interest in isolating themselves from what they saw as an increasingly dangerous anachronism. China sought to capitalize upon the destablization of the other world powers and eventually plunged the world into war by proxy support of the now shell-like governments of numerous other former great powers. Much of Asia, in particular, was ravaged, but the war ended far more swiftly than any had anticipated – the first real signs of the economic change that the nanite revolution that had been simmering only outside the Chinese borders had wrought. Defeated planetside, the mankind’s first manned interstellar venture (following probes already launched decades prior) was undertaken in haste, rather than jubilation. In a grand twist of irony, the greatly distilled population of Chinese Nationalists and assorted Nationalist allies that were to crew the two craft that left the solar system embodied, more than their particular nations, the meme of nationdom. Their haste, however, was to prove costly in the long run. Their cryoships were efficient and simple, but extremely slow. Neither of the vessels would actually be the first human craft to reach its intended destination, being in fact usurped by later sub-light settlers.
I think this kind of stuff needs to be discussed more in the Village Pump for the wiki, but that place looks pretty dead. Is anyone willing to help me clean up, cross-reference, and subsection the existing body of work, or shall I just set into doing it myself with tooth and nail until I get bored?
I just finished reworking the Forsaken page. Check it out, use view history to see what it was like. I added very little new information, but I did reorganise it. Some information was cut out but remains there, hidden in comment tags so it can be moved to a better spot. What do people think?