User:Hadseys/Organising/Page size
This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
This page contains an overview on issues related to limits on article size, which are set by:
- reader issues, such as readability, organization, information saturation, attention spans, etc.
- editor issues, for example talkpage tensions, arguments over trivial contributions, debates on how to split up a large article, etc.
- contribution issues, such as articles stop growing significantly once they reach a certain size – this does not imply, however, that there is no more information on the topic to be contributed
- technical issues, for example, browser limitations, upload speeds, cellular connections, etc.
Readability issues
Each Wikipedia article is in a process of evolution and is likely to continue growing. Other editors will add to articles when you are done with them. This is not a problem, because for most practical purposes, Wikipedia has unlimited storage space, but long articles may be more difficult to read and navigate.
An article longer than one or two pages when printed should be divided into sections to ease navigation (see the
Readers may tire of reading a page much longer than about 6,000 to 10,000 words, which roughly corresponds to 30 to 50 KB of readable prose. If an article is significantly longer than that, it may benefit the reader to move some sections to other articles and replace them with summaries (see Wikipedia:Summary style). One rule of thumb is to begin to split an article into smaller articles after the readable prose reaches 10 pages when printed. Articles that cover particularly technical subjects should, in general, be shorter than articles on less technical subjects.
For stylistic purposes, only the main body prose[1] (excluding links, see also, reference and footnote sections, and lists/tables) should be counted, since the point is to limit the size of the main body of prose.
What is and is not included as "readable prose"
"Readable prose" is the main body of the text, excluding sections such as:
- Footnotes and reference sections ("see also", "external links", footnotes, bibliography, etc)
- Diagrams and images
- Tables and lists
- Wikilinks and external URLs
- Formatting and mark-up.
A more exact list, and a means of calculating readable prose, is given in the notes.[1]
Occasional exceptions
Two exceptions are lists, and articles summarizing certain fields. These act as summaries and starting points for a field and in the case of some broad subjects or lists either do not have a natural division point or work better as a single article. In such cases, the article should nonetheless be kept short where possible. Major subsections should use summary style where a separate article for a subtopic is reasonable, and the article should be written with greater than usual attention to readability.
Readers of such articles will usually accept complexity provided the article is well written, created with a sensible structure and style, and is an appropriate length for the topic. Most articles do not need to be excessively long, but when a long or very long article is unavoidable, its complexity should be minimized. Readability is still the key criterion.
Technical issues
In the past, because of some now rarely used browsers, technical considerations prompted a strong recommendation that articles be limited to a maximum of precisely 32 KB in size, since editing any article longer than that would cause severe problems.[2] With the advent of the section editing feature and the availability of upgrades for the affected browsers, this once hard and fast rule has been softened and many articles now exist which are over 32 KB of total text size.
Even so, the total article size should be kept reasonably low, because there are many users that edit from low-speed connections. Connections to consider include
Mobile browsers can be a problem because these devices usually have little memory and a slow CPU; long pages can take too much time to process, if they can be fully loaded at all. Current
Very long articles
With some web browsers with certain plug-ins running in certain environments, articles over 400K may not render properly or at all. If possible, such very large articles should be split. If possible, split the content into logically separate articles. If necessary, split the article arbitrarily. Avoid arbitrary splitting mainspace articles unless there is a demonstrated technical problem loading the page on at least one major browser. If you do split an article arbitrarily, be careful to link the resulting parts to each other. For non-mainspace articles, consider splitting off the top and bottom parts of the article and
Web browsers which have problems with long articles
This last issue has been found in versions of
Formerly (mid-2006), there was a problem with the latest version of
Under certain environments, Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 6 are known to have difficulty loading articles over about 400K.
For notes on unrelated problems that various web browsers have with MediaWiki sites, and for a list of alternative browsers you can download, see Wikipedia:Browser notes.
Splitting an article
When you split a section from a long article into an independent article, you should leave a short summary of the material that is removed along with a pointer to the independent article. In the independent article, use the {{
No need for haste
Do not take precipitous action the very instant an article exceeds 32 KB overall. There is no need for haste, and the readable prose size should be considered separately from references and other overhead. Discuss the overall topic structure with other editors. Determine whether the topic should be treated as several shorter articles and, if so, how best to organize them. Sometimes an article simply needs to be big to give the subject adequate coverage. Certainly, size is no reason to remove valid and useful information.
Breaking out trivial or controversial sections
A relatively trivial fact may be appropriate in the context of the larger article, but inappropriate as the topic of an entire article in itself. In most cases, it is a violation of the neutral point of view to specifically break out a controversial section without leaving an adequate summary. It may also violate the neutral point of view policy to create a new article specifically to contain information that consensus has rejected from the main article. Consider other organizational principles for splitting the article, and be sure that both the title and content of the broken-out article reflect a neutral point of view.
Breaking out an unwanted section
If a section of an article is a magnet for unhelpful contributions (such as the "external links" section or
A rule of thumb
Some useful rules of thumb for splitting articles, and combining small pages:
Readable prose size | What to do |
> 100 KB | Almost certainly should be divided up |
> 60 KB | Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading time) |
> 40 KB | May eventually need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size) |
< 30 KB | Length alone does not justify division |
< 1 KB | If an article or list has remained this size for over a couple of months, consider combining it with a related page. Alternatively, why not fix it by adding more info? See Article Creation and Improvement Drive , a project to improve stubs or nonexistent articles.
|
- Please note:
These guidelines apply somewhat less to
How to find long articles
The 1000 largest articles are listed at Special:Longpages.
You can find the size of a page in the main
For pages longer than 32K, the size of the page is displayed when editing, with the message MediaWiki:longpagewarning – for example:
The ability to
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.
If you have problems editing a long article
If you have encountered an article that is so long you can't edit it, or if your browser chops off the end of the article when you try to edit it, there are a few ways you can solve the problem.
The best permanent solution is to simply upgrade to a more modern web browser, if possible. No major modern web browsers have this problem on their recent versions, and there are many other benefits to upgrading to their latest version: more recent versions will be considerably more secure, will do a better job displaying content written to more modern HTML (and other standards), and will have fixed many bugs, including this one. Many articles on Wikipedia are going to be longer than 32 KB on a permanent basis, so you will continue to have occasional problems with article length as long as you are using an older browser.
As a temporary solution, you should be able to edit the article one
If you find a section too long to edit correctly and safely, you can post a request for assistance on the Village Pump. Follow the "post" link for the assistance section, which will allow you to post a new comment without editing any existing text. Answering your request may take from an hour to a week, depending on the response of your fellow volunteer editors.
References
- ^ a b Specifically, for stylistic purposes, readable prose excludes: External links, Further reading, References, Footnotes, See also, and similar sections; Table of contents, tables, list-like sections, and similar content; and markup, interwiki links, URLs and similar formatting. To quickly estimate readable prose size, click on the printable version of the page, select all, copy, paste into an edit window, delete remaining items not counted in readable prose, and hit preview to see the page size warning.
- hard-codedlimit of 32kB
See also
- Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page
- Wikipedia:Summary style
- Pre-expand include size
- Wikipedia:section size