![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 |
Here are my timings using a fast PC with 2464 kilobits per second ADSL broadband in Europe. I first used Web Page Analyzer but I suspect its time model does not reflect actual browsers (too pessimistic), and I also tried OctaGate SiteTimer whose model appears too optimistic and sometimes fails to complete. I have now installed Firebug for Firefox and I am using its Network monitoring tool.
I clear the cache before each timing and nothing else is using the network (except some 256 byte packet every 5 seconds), and in any case the network never approached even 40% usage. All figures are seconds. All accesses made as an anonymous IP, unless "as user" is shown (which was noticeably slower).
Web page Manual timing # Firebug OctaGate ## ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- de:Barack_Obama 4 then 3 1.77 then 3.46 1.95 & 2.2 en:Barack_Obama 6 then 4-9 5.45 then 3.62 1.4 & 5.0 en:Barack_Obama May 18 7 then 5 6.41 then 4.42 en:Barack_Obama as user 9 then 5-9 8.8 then 5.78 fr:Barack_Obama 2 then 2 1.78 then 2.04 1.35 & 1.35 en:Hillary campaign 6 then 5 5.44 then 5.12 OctaGate fails en:Hillary campaign repeat 13 then 6 8.54 then 5.42
en:Russia 20 then 8 15.7 then 8.4 de:Lisa del Giocondo 3 then 2 1.49 then 2.19 0.95 & 1.2 en:Lisa del Giocondo 3 then 2 2.41 then 1.38 1.2 & 1.2 en:Lisa del Giocondo as user 3 then 3 3.71 then 3.14 fr:Lisa del Giocondo 8 then 5 7.3 then 3.18 1.4 & 1.7
citizendium Barack_Obama 3 then 5 ! 2.14 - 7.21 then 4.97 - 4.55 info.britannica.co.uk 4 then 3 2.42 then 1.79 1.5 & 2.0
Oops, I forgot to sign the above - I, User:84user, am the same as 84.223.78.86. - 84user ( talk) 00:35, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
(To the table I added Russia timings, and noted Barack Obama now takes 6.4 seconds)- 84user ( talk) 17:46, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
I have added the following to the spinout section:
“ | To conform with §4(I) of the GFDL, the new page should be created with an edit summary noting "split content from [[article name]]". (Do not omit this step or omit the page name.) A note should also be made in the edit summary of the source article, "split content to [[article name]]", to protect against the article subsequently being deleted and the history of the new page eradicated. | ” |
I believe this is necessary to secure the GFDL rights of content creators, since Wikipedians do not release their material into fair use but retain authorship credit. This is based on the language at Help:Merging and moving pages, where similar issues of separating text from contribution history exist. The link back to the source is essential at the new article, but it is also important to note the separation at the old article to help guard against history deletion. -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:38, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
This edit introduces unnecessary error, as admitted by Oakwillow, and isn't needed. We have a means of determining word count (Dr pda's script); we don't need to introduce only 22% error when we have accurate means of determining word count. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 15:00, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
It might be worthwhile to take a step back and ask why does this article exist? Is it here just for amusement? Does anyone ever read it? Is it here to actually provide a guideline? What a novel idea. Let's assume the latter. If so, I would suggest that were it to be correctly written, and correctly followed, there would be no complaints about articles being too long, and that if you are getting any complaints about an article you have worked on being too long, it is probably at least twice as long as it should be, because people don't complain about such things until they become a major problem. So take a look at any of the articles that have ever received a complaint about length, divide it by two and that is probably about what the guideline should give for size recommendations. One of the common rules of thumb when looking for cut off points is looking at percentiles, how many exceed the 85th, 90th, 95th and 99th percentile? If 30% of your articles are bigger than your guidelines, your guidelines are too low, if 1%, they clearly are too high. When you don't have to be accurate by more than 50%, an estimate that tells you the word count to within 22% is more than adequate. The way the rule was established was by looking at the 50 random articles above and doing a statistical comparison between byte count and word count and rounding the result off to an easily remembered number. The actual result was something like 12.86, you can look at the table above to see what it was (multiply bytes/character times characters/word to get bytes/word). It's better to err on the plus side than the minus side, so it was rounded down instead of up. There are many articles in the table that have a ratio greater than 12 and many with a ratio less than 12. There are many more reasons for wanting to know the approximate word count than that you are working on one of the 100 or so articles that are horrendously long, by the way. Since there is in fact a strong correlation between word count and byte count, why not tell everyone what the ratio is? Whether I am working on a 500 byte stub or a 200,000 byte article I can get a good estimate just by dividing by 12. Oakwillow ( talk) 05:07, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to point out here four size factors that I can easily see (well, 3-1/2 maybe):
In summary, beyond the primary consideration of article brevity, it's also important to think about overall download time (especially considering dialup users, of whom there are many around the world); "time to fully render page in browser", which encompasses raw text size; image size and number; and complications of the wiki software in translating and outputting the entire HTML page. Franamax ( talk) 01:54, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
Starting a new section because the above discussion continually veers off into discussing alternative units of measurement.
Going back to Compromise table #2:
Readable prose size | What to do |
---|---|
> 50 KB | Almost certainly should be divided up |
> 30 KB | Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading time) |
> 20 KB | May eventually need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size) |
< 15 KB | Length alone does not justify division |
I think this table is much closer to the values which lead to articles of acceptable length. There was discussion above on this table, including the comment from User:HermanHiddema:
I do not think it is right to say that about 30% of FA class article "probably should be divided"
It was quite rightly pointed out that circumstances vary with article quality, and that a majority of 30k+ articles are not FA quality (and are probably in need of trimming for readability).
The current values are really too large for average articles. More than 30k of readable prose is very difficult to follow unless it's exceedingly well-written. Right now the upper limit is 100k of readable prose, which is absolutely gargantuan, and the warning bells don't kick in until 60k (which is still a massive amount of readable prose and twice as long as most FAs).
I'm proposing that these values be reassessed. The guidelines could perhaps afford for quality ("GA or FA articles may justify being longer than 30k on the grounds that their material has been confirmed to be well-written and pertinent to the article"), but certainly the "fine below this line" mark has to be moved below 60k of readable prose, which should really be the upper cap - only 19 FAs overstep this, which is enough to justify an "almost certainly" warning on it. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 10:23, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
There is already a discussion of the numbers presented in table number 2. I’m not sure what the purpose is in creating another section to discuss it when the previous discussion did not reach a consensus. I do not agree with the need to make the drastic cuts in the guidelines that you advocate, and I have stated the reasons above.
I agree that 60k readable characters is way too long. Out of 2106 FA articles, here are the break points:
Readable words | Percentile |
---|---|
15,000 | 100.0 |
12,000 | 99.6 |
10,000 | 98.9 |
8,000 | 94.9 |
6,000 | 84.2 |
5,000 | 70.9 |
4,000 | 54.0 |
3,000 | 32.7 |
2,000 | 12.2 |
1,000 | 0.3 |
As the number of articles drops off very rapidly above 8,000 words, I would pick that for "Almost certainly should be divided". This corresponds to about an edit byte count of about 100,000 bytes, which sounds about right. The size warning kicks in at 80 KB ("This page is 81 kilobytes long. It may be appropriate to split this article into smaller, more specific articles."), which corresponds to about 6,000 words, so I would pick that for the "Probably should be divided" category. As you can see that is only about 15% of all FA articles. 5,000 would probably be a good spot for the "May eventually need to be divided", and 4,000 for the "Size alone" section. Readable characters should not be used because it is not industry standard and is constantly confused with Edit byte count. Oakwillow ( talk) 23:47, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
Why shouldn't Article size link to this article. I can see this redirect has been created and deleted a number of times. I think it would be a more convenient way to find this article. Eazyskankin ( talk) 19:48, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
This version provides fairly generous word counts and also avoids the confusion of using bytes to mean one of two things. In the current version bytes is used often and rarely is it clear whether it refers to readable characters or edit byte count. Instead of adding in text to clarify at each instance it is better to just use word count for readable prose and bytes for edit byte count. It also is consistent with the existing edit warnings, which never refer to readable prose. It also provides a rule of thumb, which is very accurate, for estimating word count. Oakwillow ( talk) 04:08, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm wondering about the sentence, "However, the early iMac G3 (1998 to 1999) is affected by the 32 KB limit; for example, an iMac G3 with OS 8.6 using Internet Explorer 5.1 can only copy and paste or display 32 KB in an editing box". This sounds like purely a software issue to me—probably Internet Explorer, conceivably something to do with OS 8.6. If so, it has nothing to do with the iMac or the G3 processor. Rivertorch ( talk) 17:18, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
I've noticed some online translators ( Google Translate, at the very least) have problems processing bigger pages (Check this page, for example - the point at which the translation stops varies, but, at least during the tests I made with my internet connection, the translator was never able to finish it properly). I believe this might be a valid consideration to include in the "Technical Issues" section of this article. Squeal ( talk) 10:13, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
This page on pages that are too long is too long! -- 121.45.127.71 ( talk) 02:46, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
Do symbol characters and other non-English symbols take up extra space? I just noticed the History of Vietnam article came out at 83kb which seemed very high, until looking through the text I noticed a lot of Vietnamese characters. I mean it's still a pretty long article, but would that weight of symbols make a difference? Mdw0 ( talk) 03:32, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
This is an online encycolpedia, it seems rather self-defeating to complain about articles that are "too" long just becuase they are "too" long. If you read an article about WWII, then I expect to read a very long, extended article. Why should we worry if it bores the reader? It's information without biased sources, not Entertainment Weekly. If someone is on a page, chances are they chose to read that page for a reason. I think it just comes down to the policy creaters fearing just how lazy people our. Well, if you go to an online encycolopedia you better expect to read a lot! For that reason, I propose that we remove and ignore artivcle complaints becuase of size. I can understand if they're so large that someone could have a hard time finding everything, but that's why there's a table of contents at the front. And to jump from page to page can become annoying and take more time than scrolling up and down a page. Maybe we should focuss on re-structuring articles instead of making them shorter or splitting them up. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.216.84.28 ( talk) 18:22, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
Could someone explain how, in the "Rule of Thumb" section, it says "30 kb - size alone does not justify splittng" and then "30 kb - May need to be divided". Even 50kb, nowadays is hard to justify a split for. BIGNOLE (Contact me) 03:43, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
If you already know someone, great. That would save us a lot of time. Right now I'm headed to work. Hope to hear some good news on that front. Cheers. BIGNOLE (Contact me) 11:53, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
Well, according to the sample list, Jason Voorhees is 50kb. There really isn't any place to split that article. Just to point out, I opened the Obama article and the Jason article at the same time, and the Obama article took 2 to 3 times longer to load, and I'm using a high-speed cable connection. BIGNOLE (Contact me) 11:18, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
The current guideline is not comprehensive and there is a focus by some editors on the readable prose size. I would like to see the following added to the guideline:
Reasons for splitting an article include:
|
This is based on my experiences and feedback from other editors after splitting a fair few articles -- Alan Liefting ( talk) - 07:20, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
According to this page: "You can set your preferences to make links to pages smaller than a certain size appear in a different colour. "Size" in this context means the size of the source text seen in the edit box."
Is this accurate? If so, can someone point me to the Preferences setting that allows this? More specific direction in the page itself would probably be nice as well. Propaniac ( talk) 17:36, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Under "Occasional exceptions", you do not mention controversial subjects. The article Abortion is under 100Kb because some of the volume is covered in Abortion debate, Pro-choice, and Pro-life. Is this a good thing? No, it is a clear example of content forking. On the other hand, George W. Bush, a nice example of the NPOV style, is 170Kb long as it should be.
I say that NPOV is more important than article size and that some controversial subjects cannot be adequately covered within 100Kb. This exception should be explicitely added to this page. Emmanuelm ( talk) 11:56, 11 October 2009 (UTC)
See the discussion at Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of Knight's Cross recipients of the Waffen-SS/archive1. Dabomb87 ( talk) 02:55, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
hello. new and can't find the right {{ }} to indicate that the Lovers in Paris plot section needs to be edited for content and length. thanks. GrammarEdits ( talk) 07:28, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
For having worked on several summary & main article pairs, I can tell you that most editors do not understand this concept. Unfortunately, because WP:Summary is a style, not a guideline, there is no way to enforce it. Worse, there is nothing in WP against content duplication; WP:Duplication is a red link.
If WP wants to enforce a limit on article size, WP:summary style must be promoted to a guideline. Until then, long articles will remain an unavoidable consequence of the NPOV guideline. Emmanuelm ( talk) 14:53, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
There is currently an ongoing discussion about the future of this and others MoS naming style. Please consider the issues raised in the discussion and vote if you wish GnevinAWB ( talk) 20:50, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
The section: Web browsers which have problems with large articles seems very weaseley and unclear about who is actually affected.
If in 2010 we are preventing pre-XP computers running IE 5 from accessing Wikipedia fully then I don't think that is anywhere near as big a deal as if we are preventing IE 6 users on XP from accessing the site for example. I therefore think the section should be clarified. -- Eraserhead1 < talk> 10:47, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 |
Here are my timings using a fast PC with 2464 kilobits per second ADSL broadband in Europe. I first used Web Page Analyzer but I suspect its time model does not reflect actual browsers (too pessimistic), and I also tried OctaGate SiteTimer whose model appears too optimistic and sometimes fails to complete. I have now installed Firebug for Firefox and I am using its Network monitoring tool.
I clear the cache before each timing and nothing else is using the network (except some 256 byte packet every 5 seconds), and in any case the network never approached even 40% usage. All figures are seconds. All accesses made as an anonymous IP, unless "as user" is shown (which was noticeably slower).
Web page Manual timing # Firebug OctaGate ## ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- de:Barack_Obama 4 then 3 1.77 then 3.46 1.95 & 2.2 en:Barack_Obama 6 then 4-9 5.45 then 3.62 1.4 & 5.0 en:Barack_Obama May 18 7 then 5 6.41 then 4.42 en:Barack_Obama as user 9 then 5-9 8.8 then 5.78 fr:Barack_Obama 2 then 2 1.78 then 2.04 1.35 & 1.35 en:Hillary campaign 6 then 5 5.44 then 5.12 OctaGate fails en:Hillary campaign repeat 13 then 6 8.54 then 5.42
en:Russia 20 then 8 15.7 then 8.4 de:Lisa del Giocondo 3 then 2 1.49 then 2.19 0.95 & 1.2 en:Lisa del Giocondo 3 then 2 2.41 then 1.38 1.2 & 1.2 en:Lisa del Giocondo as user 3 then 3 3.71 then 3.14 fr:Lisa del Giocondo 8 then 5 7.3 then 3.18 1.4 & 1.7
citizendium Barack_Obama 3 then 5 ! 2.14 - 7.21 then 4.97 - 4.55 info.britannica.co.uk 4 then 3 2.42 then 1.79 1.5 & 2.0
Oops, I forgot to sign the above - I, User:84user, am the same as 84.223.78.86. - 84user ( talk) 00:35, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
(To the table I added Russia timings, and noted Barack Obama now takes 6.4 seconds)- 84user ( talk) 17:46, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
I have added the following to the spinout section:
“ | To conform with §4(I) of the GFDL, the new page should be created with an edit summary noting "split content from [[article name]]". (Do not omit this step or omit the page name.) A note should also be made in the edit summary of the source article, "split content to [[article name]]", to protect against the article subsequently being deleted and the history of the new page eradicated. | ” |
I believe this is necessary to secure the GFDL rights of content creators, since Wikipedians do not release their material into fair use but retain authorship credit. This is based on the language at Help:Merging and moving pages, where similar issues of separating text from contribution history exist. The link back to the source is essential at the new article, but it is also important to note the separation at the old article to help guard against history deletion. -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 12:38, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
This edit introduces unnecessary error, as admitted by Oakwillow, and isn't needed. We have a means of determining word count (Dr pda's script); we don't need to introduce only 22% error when we have accurate means of determining word count. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 15:00, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
It might be worthwhile to take a step back and ask why does this article exist? Is it here just for amusement? Does anyone ever read it? Is it here to actually provide a guideline? What a novel idea. Let's assume the latter. If so, I would suggest that were it to be correctly written, and correctly followed, there would be no complaints about articles being too long, and that if you are getting any complaints about an article you have worked on being too long, it is probably at least twice as long as it should be, because people don't complain about such things until they become a major problem. So take a look at any of the articles that have ever received a complaint about length, divide it by two and that is probably about what the guideline should give for size recommendations. One of the common rules of thumb when looking for cut off points is looking at percentiles, how many exceed the 85th, 90th, 95th and 99th percentile? If 30% of your articles are bigger than your guidelines, your guidelines are too low, if 1%, they clearly are too high. When you don't have to be accurate by more than 50%, an estimate that tells you the word count to within 22% is more than adequate. The way the rule was established was by looking at the 50 random articles above and doing a statistical comparison between byte count and word count and rounding the result off to an easily remembered number. The actual result was something like 12.86, you can look at the table above to see what it was (multiply bytes/character times characters/word to get bytes/word). It's better to err on the plus side than the minus side, so it was rounded down instead of up. There are many articles in the table that have a ratio greater than 12 and many with a ratio less than 12. There are many more reasons for wanting to know the approximate word count than that you are working on one of the 100 or so articles that are horrendously long, by the way. Since there is in fact a strong correlation between word count and byte count, why not tell everyone what the ratio is? Whether I am working on a 500 byte stub or a 200,000 byte article I can get a good estimate just by dividing by 12. Oakwillow ( talk) 05:07, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to point out here four size factors that I can easily see (well, 3-1/2 maybe):
In summary, beyond the primary consideration of article brevity, it's also important to think about overall download time (especially considering dialup users, of whom there are many around the world); "time to fully render page in browser", which encompasses raw text size; image size and number; and complications of the wiki software in translating and outputting the entire HTML page. Franamax ( talk) 01:54, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
Starting a new section because the above discussion continually veers off into discussing alternative units of measurement.
Going back to Compromise table #2:
Readable prose size | What to do |
---|---|
> 50 KB | Almost certainly should be divided up |
> 30 KB | Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading time) |
> 20 KB | May eventually need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size) |
< 15 KB | Length alone does not justify division |
I think this table is much closer to the values which lead to articles of acceptable length. There was discussion above on this table, including the comment from User:HermanHiddema:
I do not think it is right to say that about 30% of FA class article "probably should be divided"
It was quite rightly pointed out that circumstances vary with article quality, and that a majority of 30k+ articles are not FA quality (and are probably in need of trimming for readability).
The current values are really too large for average articles. More than 30k of readable prose is very difficult to follow unless it's exceedingly well-written. Right now the upper limit is 100k of readable prose, which is absolutely gargantuan, and the warning bells don't kick in until 60k (which is still a massive amount of readable prose and twice as long as most FAs).
I'm proposing that these values be reassessed. The guidelines could perhaps afford for quality ("GA or FA articles may justify being longer than 30k on the grounds that their material has been confirmed to be well-written and pertinent to the article"), but certainly the "fine below this line" mark has to be moved below 60k of readable prose, which should really be the upper cap - only 19 FAs overstep this, which is enough to justify an "almost certainly" warning on it. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 10:23, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
There is already a discussion of the numbers presented in table number 2. I’m not sure what the purpose is in creating another section to discuss it when the previous discussion did not reach a consensus. I do not agree with the need to make the drastic cuts in the guidelines that you advocate, and I have stated the reasons above.
I agree that 60k readable characters is way too long. Out of 2106 FA articles, here are the break points:
Readable words | Percentile |
---|---|
15,000 | 100.0 |
12,000 | 99.6 |
10,000 | 98.9 |
8,000 | 94.9 |
6,000 | 84.2 |
5,000 | 70.9 |
4,000 | 54.0 |
3,000 | 32.7 |
2,000 | 12.2 |
1,000 | 0.3 |
As the number of articles drops off very rapidly above 8,000 words, I would pick that for "Almost certainly should be divided". This corresponds to about an edit byte count of about 100,000 bytes, which sounds about right. The size warning kicks in at 80 KB ("This page is 81 kilobytes long. It may be appropriate to split this article into smaller, more specific articles."), which corresponds to about 6,000 words, so I would pick that for the "Probably should be divided" category. As you can see that is only about 15% of all FA articles. 5,000 would probably be a good spot for the "May eventually need to be divided", and 4,000 for the "Size alone" section. Readable characters should not be used because it is not industry standard and is constantly confused with Edit byte count. Oakwillow ( talk) 23:47, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
Why shouldn't Article size link to this article. I can see this redirect has been created and deleted a number of times. I think it would be a more convenient way to find this article. Eazyskankin ( talk) 19:48, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
This version provides fairly generous word counts and also avoids the confusion of using bytes to mean one of two things. In the current version bytes is used often and rarely is it clear whether it refers to readable characters or edit byte count. Instead of adding in text to clarify at each instance it is better to just use word count for readable prose and bytes for edit byte count. It also is consistent with the existing edit warnings, which never refer to readable prose. It also provides a rule of thumb, which is very accurate, for estimating word count. Oakwillow ( talk) 04:08, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm wondering about the sentence, "However, the early iMac G3 (1998 to 1999) is affected by the 32 KB limit; for example, an iMac G3 with OS 8.6 using Internet Explorer 5.1 can only copy and paste or display 32 KB in an editing box". This sounds like purely a software issue to me—probably Internet Explorer, conceivably something to do with OS 8.6. If so, it has nothing to do with the iMac or the G3 processor. Rivertorch ( talk) 17:18, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
I've noticed some online translators ( Google Translate, at the very least) have problems processing bigger pages (Check this page, for example - the point at which the translation stops varies, but, at least during the tests I made with my internet connection, the translator was never able to finish it properly). I believe this might be a valid consideration to include in the "Technical Issues" section of this article. Squeal ( talk) 10:13, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
This page on pages that are too long is too long! -- 121.45.127.71 ( talk) 02:46, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
Do symbol characters and other non-English symbols take up extra space? I just noticed the History of Vietnam article came out at 83kb which seemed very high, until looking through the text I noticed a lot of Vietnamese characters. I mean it's still a pretty long article, but would that weight of symbols make a difference? Mdw0 ( talk) 03:32, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
This is an online encycolpedia, it seems rather self-defeating to complain about articles that are "too" long just becuase they are "too" long. If you read an article about WWII, then I expect to read a very long, extended article. Why should we worry if it bores the reader? It's information without biased sources, not Entertainment Weekly. If someone is on a page, chances are they chose to read that page for a reason. I think it just comes down to the policy creaters fearing just how lazy people our. Well, if you go to an online encycolopedia you better expect to read a lot! For that reason, I propose that we remove and ignore artivcle complaints becuase of size. I can understand if they're so large that someone could have a hard time finding everything, but that's why there's a table of contents at the front. And to jump from page to page can become annoying and take more time than scrolling up and down a page. Maybe we should focuss on re-structuring articles instead of making them shorter or splitting them up. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.216.84.28 ( talk) 18:22, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
Could someone explain how, in the "Rule of Thumb" section, it says "30 kb - size alone does not justify splittng" and then "30 kb - May need to be divided". Even 50kb, nowadays is hard to justify a split for. BIGNOLE (Contact me) 03:43, 7 April 2009 (UTC)
If you already know someone, great. That would save us a lot of time. Right now I'm headed to work. Hope to hear some good news on that front. Cheers. BIGNOLE (Contact me) 11:53, 21 April 2009 (UTC)
Well, according to the sample list, Jason Voorhees is 50kb. There really isn't any place to split that article. Just to point out, I opened the Obama article and the Jason article at the same time, and the Obama article took 2 to 3 times longer to load, and I'm using a high-speed cable connection. BIGNOLE (Contact me) 11:18, 22 April 2009 (UTC)
The current guideline is not comprehensive and there is a focus by some editors on the readable prose size. I would like to see the following added to the guideline:
Reasons for splitting an article include:
|
This is based on my experiences and feedback from other editors after splitting a fair few articles -- Alan Liefting ( talk) - 07:20, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
According to this page: "You can set your preferences to make links to pages smaller than a certain size appear in a different colour. "Size" in this context means the size of the source text seen in the edit box."
Is this accurate? If so, can someone point me to the Preferences setting that allows this? More specific direction in the page itself would probably be nice as well. Propaniac ( talk) 17:36, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Under "Occasional exceptions", you do not mention controversial subjects. The article Abortion is under 100Kb because some of the volume is covered in Abortion debate, Pro-choice, and Pro-life. Is this a good thing? No, it is a clear example of content forking. On the other hand, George W. Bush, a nice example of the NPOV style, is 170Kb long as it should be.
I say that NPOV is more important than article size and that some controversial subjects cannot be adequately covered within 100Kb. This exception should be explicitely added to this page. Emmanuelm ( talk) 11:56, 11 October 2009 (UTC)
See the discussion at Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of Knight's Cross recipients of the Waffen-SS/archive1. Dabomb87 ( talk) 02:55, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
hello. new and can't find the right {{ }} to indicate that the Lovers in Paris plot section needs to be edited for content and length. thanks. GrammarEdits ( talk) 07:28, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
For having worked on several summary & main article pairs, I can tell you that most editors do not understand this concept. Unfortunately, because WP:Summary is a style, not a guideline, there is no way to enforce it. Worse, there is nothing in WP against content duplication; WP:Duplication is a red link.
If WP wants to enforce a limit on article size, WP:summary style must be promoted to a guideline. Until then, long articles will remain an unavoidable consequence of the NPOV guideline. Emmanuelm ( talk) 14:53, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
There is currently an ongoing discussion about the future of this and others MoS naming style. Please consider the issues raised in the discussion and vote if you wish GnevinAWB ( talk) 20:50, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
The section: Web browsers which have problems with large articles seems very weaseley and unclear about who is actually affected.
If in 2010 we are preventing pre-XP computers running IE 5 from accessing Wikipedia fully then I don't think that is anywhere near as big a deal as if we are preventing IE 6 users on XP from accessing the site for example. I therefore think the section should be clarified. -- Eraserhead1 < talk> 10:47, 9 May 2010 (UTC)