[Wikipedia-l] Limits to the non-paperiness of Wikipedia?

Wed May 28 19:29:12 UTC 2003

On Wed, 2003-05-28 at 14:56, Oliver Pereira wrote:
> However, Erik's constraint that articles shouldn't be such that they will
> always remain stubs would probably disqualify it, if we accept his wish
> for articles to be 20,000 to 30,000 characters in length. It is currently
> less than 2,000 characters long. It could be expanded using the news
> article and whatever is sufficiently trustworthy on the tribute site, and
> padded with some relevant background about the school and neighbourhood
> and so on, but it would probably still be under 10,000 characters.
> 
> But isn't this length business just a matter of personal taste?
> Personally, I find long articles quite off-putting. [[Charles Darwin]],
> for example, only just barely qualifies as a decently sized article
> according to Erik, while I think it could do with being split into
> separate sections.
> 
> Clearly I don't have Erik's attention span. :) But do we *really* want
> articles that are over 10,000 characters long? And if so, why? I'm sure
> I'm not the only one who finds it a daunting task to try to edit long
> articles, especially if there is major restructuring to be done. If we
> want Wikipedia to be open to everyone, and easy to edit, I think we should
> seriously consider aiming for shorter articles everywhere. A reader who
> wants to read 30K of information about a subject would still be able to;
> they'd have to read three articles instead of one, maybe, but it would
> only involve two clicks of the mouse...
> 
I, for one, strongly disagree with the Long-Entrians. I am a Atomizer.
Short, interlinked entries are most appropriate for the medium, both in
reading and editing.