dpbsmith(a)verizon.net wrote:
I've Been Bold and rewritten the message. It now
reads:
"Note: This page is 38 kilobytes long. Under current article size
guidelines, articles that exceed 32KB are considered to be too long. It
may be appropriate to restructure this topic into a related series of
shorter articles, or split off a section of it as a separate article.
However, these are major structural changes which should not be made
hastily, and should be made by consensus agreement among editors of the
page. See the guidelines for details."
I'd like it made harsher: see below.
> So what are the generally accepted criteria for
length of articles in
> encyclopedias?
People should be getting tired of my stock answer to
this, which is that
the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica contains articles
which exceed one megabyte in size. I need to get to the library and see
what size the juicier articles in the Britannica 3 Macropaedia are.
A vastly important consideration is that text is remarkably harder to
read on a screen than on paper. The 32K article that's a lot of work to
read on screen is a lot easier to read on a printout - but almost no-one
(comparatively) will be reading a printout. 32K is when your eyes fall off
the screen, if not well before.
- d.