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

Wed May 28 20:06:52 UTC 2003

Oliver Pereira <omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk> writes:

> But do we *really* want articles that are over 10,000 characters long?

Sure.

> And if so, why?

As a reader I want info belonging together in oen article, I'm not that
much interested in clicking around.  I'm also not interested in
download and reading and scrolling away all this navigation stuff.

Many a lot fragmented pages are only useful if you want to offer banner
ads and stuff like that.

> 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.

This is a problem.  My solution is to copy-and-paste centents into my
editor, do the editing business (check it into my local CVS), and paste
it back into the webbrowser for publishing.

Also, "fragment links" are not supported, you know, these
"http://example/page.html#fragment" pointers.

> 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...

Don't worry too much, most articles start small...

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