[WikiEN-l] Article size consistency 32k

Fri May 20 21:26:13 UTC 2005

--- David 'DJ' Hedley <spyders at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Unless we're living in a world of 56K internet still, I think 32K could
> become at least 50K. Even articles on albums by Eminem and so forth are
> getting above 32K - Giving that limit is slowly even limiting the growth of
> good articles. If an article grows above that it should be allowed to grow,
> unless it is obviously repeating itself.

Yeah, let it grow. But at some point some sections will need to be summarized
and the detail put into a daughter article. We need not burden readers with
more detail than is necessary - those that want more detail on the sub topic
covered by that section can skip ahead directly to the main article for that
section. 

My own opinion is that almost all articles are probably too long once they
enter the 30 to 45KB range but some topics are so expansive that they are not
too long at even 50KB. At the same time some other topics are so narrowly
focused that they could be considered too detailed even if they don't trigger a
page size warning. 

We had a long discussion about this a month ago on the featured article
criteria talk page. The general consensus was against specific numerical limits
while at the same time not having articles be longer than needed to pass the
other FAC criteria. The only outstanding matter is finding some wording that
can be agreed upon so that can be added as a FAC criteria. 

Part of good writing is prioritizing what information should be presented up
front to readers vs what can be best dealt with in other related articles. Some
points:
*Readers should have the ability to zoom to the level of detail they need.
Having all the detail on one page does not allow for that. 
*Do this by summarizing and providing links to more detailed treatments on
those sub topics. 
*What matters is that Wikipedia has lots of detail on a topic, not that all
that detail is on the same page. 

-- mav 

Discover Yahoo! 
Stay in touch with email, IM, photo sharing and more. Check it out! 
http://discover.yahoo.com/stayintouch.html