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Human cannibalism article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
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![]() | This article is written in British English with Oxford spelling (colour, realize, organization, analyse; note that -ize is used instead of -ise) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus. |
This article is very long – the Page size tool show about 17,550 words of "readable prose". WP:SIZERULE recommends that articles with over 15,000 words "almost certainly should be divided or trimmed", while those with over 9,000 words "probably should be divided or trimmed". I don't think that "trimming" the article to less than 9,000 words would be a good option – it would require very hard editing and probably throw out a lot of potentially interesting information.
So, what about splitting? Moving out some parts into specialized articles in summary style? I think that's a more reasonable option.
But if so, how to split? Which articles to create? Here's a breakdown of the major sections by size (all sections not mentioned have considerably less than 1000 words):
So, the bulk of the article is in the History section. Even if we moved it out into a separate article History of cannibalism or History of human cannibalism, that article would still be a candidate for further splitting or trimming. Plus, such a "general history" would be a very broad topic for one article, and maybe not what readers will expect. So, how about we split the section further? My suggestion would be to create several articles, roughly one for each continent:
Each of the articles would then document the history of cannibalism on that continent, with only a short summary remaining in this article. The proposed list of articles is very similar to the subcategories listed in Category:Cannibalism by continent, except that there are two separate categories for North and South America (there used to be a category for cannibalism in the Americas too, but it was recently deleted). However, as much of the historical evidence comes from Mesoamerica or the Caribbean, I don't think the distinction between North and South fits so well here and would therefore suggest to cover this double continent in a single article.
What do others here think? Gawaon ( talk) 18:10, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
It occurred to me that the current pictures in "breasts, palms, and soles" could be replaced instead by pictures in "modes of preparation." This would avoid the long wall of text problem whilst avoiding that section being potentially off-putting to some readers. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about where good pictures on that topic would be found, so it's just an idea for others that I throwing out there. BioLabEmergency ( talk) 07:48, 24 May 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Human cannibalism article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives:
1,
2,
3Auto-archiving period: 90 days
![]() |
![]() | This ![]() It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | This article is written in British English with Oxford spelling (colour, realize, organization, analyse; note that -ize is used instead of -ise) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus. |
This article is very long – the Page size tool show about 17,550 words of "readable prose". WP:SIZERULE recommends that articles with over 15,000 words "almost certainly should be divided or trimmed", while those with over 9,000 words "probably should be divided or trimmed". I don't think that "trimming" the article to less than 9,000 words would be a good option – it would require very hard editing and probably throw out a lot of potentially interesting information.
So, what about splitting? Moving out some parts into specialized articles in summary style? I think that's a more reasonable option.
But if so, how to split? Which articles to create? Here's a breakdown of the major sections by size (all sections not mentioned have considerably less than 1000 words):
So, the bulk of the article is in the History section. Even if we moved it out into a separate article History of cannibalism or History of human cannibalism, that article would still be a candidate for further splitting or trimming. Plus, such a "general history" would be a very broad topic for one article, and maybe not what readers will expect. So, how about we split the section further? My suggestion would be to create several articles, roughly one for each continent:
Each of the articles would then document the history of cannibalism on that continent, with only a short summary remaining in this article. The proposed list of articles is very similar to the subcategories listed in Category:Cannibalism by continent, except that there are two separate categories for North and South America (there used to be a category for cannibalism in the Americas too, but it was recently deleted). However, as much of the historical evidence comes from Mesoamerica or the Caribbean, I don't think the distinction between North and South fits so well here and would therefore suggest to cover this double continent in a single article.
What do others here think? Gawaon ( talk) 18:10, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
It occurred to me that the current pictures in "breasts, palms, and soles" could be replaced instead by pictures in "modes of preparation." This would avoid the long wall of text problem whilst avoiding that section being potentially off-putting to some readers. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about where good pictures on that topic would be found, so it's just an idea for others that I throwing out there. BioLabEmergency ( talk) 07:48, 24 May 2024 (UTC)