Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/November 2023/Op-ed
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- By Hawkeye7
Should Wikipedia articles be short or comprehensive?
This is more helpful to the reader than a very long article that just keeps growing, eventually reaching book length. Summary style keeps the reader from being overwhelmed by too much information up front, by summarizing main points and going into more details on particular points (subtopics) in separate articles. What constitutes "too long" varies by situation, but generally
The reference to 50 kilobytes of readable prose requires some unpacking. First of all,
A bigger gotcha lies in the term "readable prose". This is characters in the main body of the text, excluding material such as footnotes and reference sections ("see also", "external links", bibliography, etc), diagrams and images, tables and lists, Wikilinks and external URLs, and formatting and markup. This is pretty reasonable in my opinion (although universities count footnotes in the thesis size Goddammit) but for articles with a lot of tables, this doesn't work nearly so well. You can use the
Readable prose is much smaller than the markup, which in turn is smaller than the resultant HTML that is actually used to render a page. The actual download size to your computer or smart phone is dependent on the images, which take up far more bandwidth even in 64K thumbnail size. There is indeed a technical limit to markup size, but it is very large: 2 megabytes. It's been done, with the help of templates. The limitations of the template language made many simple templates absurdly large, but the advent of the MediaWiki Scribunto extension means that these can now be written in Lua, with consequent improvements in efficiency. The crucial point is that readable prose size has no bearing on how quickly or slowly a page loads.
The arbitrary nature of the numbers in WP:SIZE and its restrictions
The root of the problem lies in our conception of what an encyclopaedia should look like. Most encyclopaedias consist of short articles; the Micropædia of the Encyclopædia Britannica has 65,000 articles with fewer than 750 words each. Often overlooked is the accompanying Macropædia with its 699 in-depth articles that range up to 310 pages in length. This arose from the nature of the publication, although the Britannica was both large and expensive, there was a restriction on the size of articles owing to the cost of publication.
We know a lot about how readers approach the articles that was not known when the guideline was written back in 2004:
- Most just read the lead and nothing else
- Many do not read the article sequentially, but jump around looking for very specific information
- Only a small percentage read the whole article from top to bottom
Therefore, to service the readers' needs, articles need to be comprehensive and detailed, with a well-written lead.
If an article exceeds WP:SIZE limits, we have three techniques for reducing article size:
- Material can be deleted outright;
- Text can be trimmed to use fewer words to say the same thing;
- Sections can be splitoff into subarticles.
The first technique cannot be used simply to reduce the size of an article. Material should be
The second technique looks more promising. Some good essays have been written on how to do this, including our Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Copy-editing essentials, User:Tony1/Redundancy exercises: removing fluff from your writing and the Wikipedia:Principle of Some Astonishment. Following this advice will improve your article writing style, but it is not a panacea. When it comes to reducing the overall size of an article, one should not expect too much from trimming; experience has shown that perhaps a five percent reduction can be expected at best.
Which brings us to the third technique: splitting off subarticles. This is called summary style. The idea is that sections of long articles should be spun off into their own articles, leaving summaries in their place. A fuller treatment of a major subtopic can have a separate article of its own. This holds out the possibility of substantial savings in the size of the parent article. However, this technique has limitations that need to be carefully considered before embarking on such a course of action.
The first is that a child article must be a complete encyclopaedic article in its own right. That means that it must meet our
Another limitation is that a when a child article is created from a section it must be replaced with a summary in its parent article, which must be similar to the lead in the child article. Simply replacing the section with a hatnote is unacceptable. Apart from the illogic of violating one guideline in the pursuit of another, the readers really do not like this. Put simply, for reasons not fully understood, they do not like following links, and will complain on the talk page when forced to do so. This problem is compounded by the fact that child articles often do not appear in searches with common search engines, which may direct the reader to the main article even if a child article is available.
What this means for the editor trying to reduce the size of an article is that spawning a child article will not reduce the article in size by that of the section being split off. To achieve a reduction, we need to locate a section with more than just a few paragraphs. Not articles have sections that can easily be split off, so in some cases the parent article may need considerable restructuring in order to create one. The creation of child articles also comes with a maintenance overhead. If a child article changes, the summary in the parent article will need to be changed as well.
WP:SIZE is a guideline, and
There is no need for haste in splitting an article when it starts getting large. Sometimes an article simply needs to be big to give the subject adequate coverage.
In summary, WP:SIZE posits arbitrary size limits on articles, and meeting them may involve considerable work for the article writers and generate conflict with other guidelines while detracting from the quality of the work delivered to the readers.
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