″Lumping and splitting are opposing tendencies in any discipline which has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper/splitter problem occurs when there is the need to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example schools of literature, biological taxa and so on. A “lumper” is an individual who takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns examples broadly, assuming that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A “splitter” is an individual who takes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways.
Philosophy
Freeman Dyson has suggested that “observers of the philosophical scene” can be broadly, if over-simplistically, divided into splitters and lumpers, roughly corresponding to materialists, who imagine the world as divided into atoms, and Platonists, who regard the world as made up of ideas.
Wikipedia philosophies
Two of the many underlying philosophies of Wikipedia are mergism and separatism: the former defends that minor topics should be merged into the relevant main articles, while the latter advocates for splitting minor topics off into their own articles.″
″Lumping and splitting are opposing tendencies in any discipline which has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper/splitter problem occurs when there is the need to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example schools of literature, biological taxa and so on. A “lumper” is an individual who takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns examples broadly, assuming that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A “splitter” is an individual who takes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways. Philosophy
Freeman Dyson has suggested that “observers of the philosophical scene” can be broadly, if over-simplistically, divided into splitters and lumpers, roughly corresponding to materialists, who imagine the world as divided into atoms, and Platonists, who regard the world as made up of ideas. Wikipedia philosophies
Two of the many underlying philosophies of Wikipedia are mergism and separatism: the former defends that minor topics should be merged into the relevant main articles, while the latter advocates for splitting minor topics off into their own articles.″
-Wikipedia