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

Thu May 29 06:42:00 UTC 2003

Oliver-
> 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.

Let me rephrase my argument: A subject which cannot be covered in such  
detail should not have its own article. It should not be merged into  
another text if it can realistically grow to that size when relying on  
verifiable information. I think you understood it this way, but I'm not  
sure everyone else did.

The length itself is debatable, but I think most of us agree that we don't  
want one-paragraph texts about every single fictional character out there.

Long articles have several advantages:
* A topic is kept in context, eliminating the need to write a separate  
intro for each individual article
* It becomes easy to save, print and pass around an article covering all  
relevant information
* We do not require the reader to click around unnecessarily, which can be  
confusing to many people
* Should we decide on some major structural change or even a deletion, it  
becomes easier to fix things
* The same goes for links: The less articles there are, the less double  
redirects, the less links that need to be manually edited and so on
* A short average article length does not reflect well on our article  
count, which is one of the key instruments used for size comparisons

The arguments against long articles:

Hard to edit:
One of the features on my personal wishlist is the ability to edit an  
individual article section. If you have this preference enabled (should be  
default for signed in users, off for anons) you get an "[edit]" link next  
to each article section headline, and this individual section can be  
loaded into the edit window. This makes it trivial to edit large articles.

No linkability to individual sections:
Supporting a [[foo#bar]] style syntax is not the problem. However, keeping  
these links working is non-trivial. It might be desirable to only have  
this label functionality for some sections, instead of automatically  
turning every section title into a label.

Attention span:
This is a valid argument, but splitting up articles is not the solution:  
instead of giving our reader easy access to the pertinent info, we now  
hide it with the justification that it is "too much to read". The solution  
is structure. Have a proper introduction with a decent summary, and put  
every relevant piece of information into the right section. We could try  
to develop guidelines for structuring articles in specific subject areas.

For some articles, splitting off specific points, e.g. long criticism  
discussions, may be desirable to avoid detracting from the main substance  
of the article. But this gets us into NPOV territory, and should be  
discussed for each individual article.

Regards,

Erik