[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l Digest, Vol 5, Issue 39

Fri Dec 19 00:56:45 UTC 2003

Erik Moeller wrote:

>      I feel that it is extremely tedious to have to click around many  
> times and load many pages to get a complete picture of an issue, a person  
> etc. This is even more applicable for printing, of course, but also a  
> general problem. I think an article should have as much information  
> related to its title as possible for that reason, and things should only  
> be split off if a certain maximum size is reached (I tend towards 30-40K),  
> or if they are not really related.
>     [...]
> 
>     I implemented section editing to make it easier to handle long  
> articles. We will also address the edit conflict issue soon. In terms of  
> linking, would you be happier with long articles if redirects could point  
> to anchors? Then History of sports could redirect to Sports#History. I  
> fail to see which other advantages might be gained from having many small  
> articles on a subject instead of one reasonably large one.

This is a huge drawback and a very strong reason for creating
concentrated articles. For example, if I, with your system, is editing
an article about say Internet Security and wants to make a reference
to ARP Spoofing I wouldn't be able to do that. Since I don't think it
would be necessary to describe exactly how the hack is done in the
article, I would want to link to another article. But which one? Would
it be: [[ARP Spoofing]], [[Address Resolution Protocol]] or [[The TCP/IP
Protocl Suite]] (likely a gigantic article)? What would the readers of
my article think would be best? 

Anchors would partially solve that issue. But you would still have the
problem that the paragraph's in [[The TCP/IP Protocol Suite]] probably
would discuss ARP Spoofing in a whole different context than the one
my readers just left. It would be much better to have it in a separate
article which would make it context neutral. However, that easily
creates the "man page problem" - information written completely out of
context and therefore totally useless to the reader. The only easiy
solution to that problem is to repeat and make articles overlap. In
that way both views could be satisfied. And there's no shame in
redundancy.

Then there is the problems that many writers (like me) have with large
articles. The longer the article is, the harder it is to edit. For me
the time it takes to edit an article (that I wasn't the orignator of)
roughly doubles for each paragraph in the article. I'm not sure why,
but with longer articles you not only has to take into consideration
the actual text but also the authors flow of language, context, style
and so on. For example, check the article History of post-communist
Russia and the other articles 172 has written on Russian history. They
are great, well worth the read, well written and in general extremely
Brilliant Prose. But they aren't edited much. Every part of
Russia's/Soviet's 20th century history is surrounded by controversies
and political issues. Partisans from all over the world should
continually be involved in meaningless revert wars on those articles!
But they aren't. Why?

I draw the conclusion that others also feel that long articles are
hard to edit.