From: James Duffy
Absolutely correct. Encyclopædic articles are not simply limited by
paper
but by a range of other issues; readability, context, comprendability, communicative structure, layout, etc. Extraordinarily complex topics
need
a lot of space; World Wars I and II, Vietnam War, intellectual concepts, major historical facts, etc but except in extreme cases we need to keep biographies readable, not turn them into theses simply because we
don't
have a paper usgae limit. Saying 'lets get everything we can in because we
can'
isn't encyclopædic, it is amateurish.
No, actually "encyclopedic", in its root meaning, is "including everything".
Encylopædias communicate themes, movements, contexts, relevances, not a 'fling the whole lot in'
approach..
We have books to do that. An encyclopædia fulfils a different educational role.
A dead-tree encyclopedia fulfils a different educational role. Wikipedia is not a dead-tree encyclopedia.
Your argument conflates trying to include everything in Wikipedia with making impossibly long articles.
That is fallacious.
It is TRUE that people should avoid making super-long articles because of readability, editability, etc.
It is FALSE that people should avoid adding tons of content because of the problems of super-long articles.
There should be a limit on the length of entries; if not formally enforced, then informally.
A method of automagically linking associated articles in an intelligent manner would be a helpful (though complicated to implement) tool.