On Fri, 20 May 2005, Fred Bauder wrote:
The issue is always download speed when we serve a diverse international audience and at least make noises about serving the poor and the third world. Serving up articles over 100kb long with several images each over 200kb will basically stop a slower computer with limited memory operating with a modem in its tracks, sometimes even requiring a reboot. Essentially the site becomes unusable.
It's not only the third world that needs to rely on dialup; the majority of Internet users in the US -- which, last I checked, was still counted as one of the developed countries -- still have dialup connections (like yours truly).
And the primary problem I have with accessing information from Wikipedia is not the article length (although a concise well-organized article is always better than a long discursive one, no matter the amount of detail contained), but the size & number of images.
Maybe I ought to squawk more about those pages where someone has stuffed into it as many images as they can find about the subject. After all, EN-Wikipedia isn't the only archive available for usage-free graphics -- even on Wikimedia.
Geoff