[WikiEN-l] Re: "The 32K limit made me do it"

Mon Feb 28 22:57:53 UTC 2005

dpbsmith at verizon.net wrote:

> I've Been Bold and rewritten the message. It now reads:
> "Note: This page is 38 kilobytes long. Under current  article size 
> guidelines, articles that exceed 32KB are considered to be too long. It 
> may be appropriate to restructure this topic into a related series of 
> shorter articles, or split off a section of it as a separate article. 
> However, these are major structural changes which should not be made 
> hastily, and should be made by consensus agreement among editors of the 
> page. See the guidelines for details."

I'd like it made harsher: see below.

>> So what are the generally accepted criteria for length of articles in
>> encyclopedias?

> People should be getting tired of my stock answer to this, which is that 
> the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica contains articles 
> which exceed one megabyte in size. I need to get to the library and see 
> what size the juicier articles in the Britannica 3 Macropaedia are.

A vastly important consideration is that text is remarkably harder to
read on a screen than on paper. The 32K article that's a lot of work to
read on screen is a lot easier to read on a printout - but almost no-one
(comparatively) will be reading a printout. 32K is when your eyes fall off
the screen, if not well before.

- d.