Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
Part of good writing is prioritizing what information should be presented up front to readers vs what can be best dealt with in other related articles. Some points: *Readers should have the ability to zoom to the level of detail they need. Having all the detail on one page does not allow for that. *Do this by summarizing and providing links to more detailed treatments on those sub topics. *What matters is that Wikipedia has lots of detail on a topic, not that all that detail is on the same page.
Absolutely. Just because wiki is not paper does not mean that the old book encyclopaedia editors weren't on to something when they encouraged brevity. The various articles on cities (eg. [[Melbourne]]) are good examples of breaking a long topic into subsections.
The other issue for a wiki is that 32k of wiki markup translates into many more kb of HTML that has to be rendered in the browser. A couple of bytes of template call can mean many more bytes of HTML. This needs to be remembered.