1) I'm not necessary challenging the 32K limit itself. I was urging that the message present 32K as a _soft_ limit, a guideline requiring _deliberate_ action. The old message sounds like a call to jump in and do something immediately.
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."
The new text links to [[Wikipedia:Article size]]. That article should now be expanded to discuss not just the technical issue but some obvious observations on size problems should be handled. Specifically, it should say that if a _controversial_ section of the article has grown large, it should _not_ be split off as a separate article _unless_ all editors are certain that the title and content of the new article exhibit a neutral point of view.
2) Christiaan Briggs christiaan@last-straw.net asks
So what are the generally accepted criteria for length of articles in encyclopedias?
Christiaan
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.
3) An important consideration is _how well indexed_ the encyclopedia is. It's a benefit if you can guess the location of your article without having to consult the index. The Britannica 3 Micropaedia is sort of interesting: it's essentially a TEN-volume combination of an index and all the stub-sized articles. The Britannica 11th is notable for having an absolutely superb index.
In case anyone doesn't know, indexing a traditional book is a specialty in itself and involves huge amounts of judgement and creativity. People tend to think that it's a mechanical task that can be done by a computer. It can't. A computer has no idea _what terms need to be indexed._ Computer-generated indices have a terrible tendency to generate entries that have a list of fifty page references following them, because the computer doesn't know which are the important ones, and doesn't know how to replace a single entry term ("London, Jack" 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36...) with several narrower terms ("London, Jack: paternity of, 20; infancy, 21; travels to Yukon, 23; breaks into print, 25; affair with Charmian, 30; ...)
I haven't tried to test this objectively, but my impression is that, comparing Wikipedia/(current) Britannica 3/(classic) 1911 Britannica,
a) _if_ the subject you want _is_ treated in the encyclopedia, b) _if_ you don't succeed in guessing the entry term correctly on your first try, and c) are forced to resort to search/Micropaedia/index,
you are _more_ likely to find what you're looking for in either Britannica than in Wikipedia.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
- I'm not necessary challenging the 32K limit itself. I was urging
that the message present 32K as a _soft_ limit, a guideline requiring _deliberate_ action. The old message sounds like a call to jump in and do something immediately.
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 just compared this with the existing message. This one has 77 words compared to 29 on the existing one. Considering also that the first seven words remain unchange this represents a revision that is more than three times the old size. If we are to encourage succinctness, brevity here would serve as an excellent example. :-)
Ec
dpbsmith@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.
David Gerard wrote:
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.
Important maybe but I'm not sure about vastly. It needs to be weighed against other factors such as the fact that screens aren't going to be the only way of viewing Wikipedia content downstream and that many people don't read whole articles but often refer to parts of articles.
Christiaan
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 22:57:53 +0000, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
dpbsmith@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.
So? We don't necessarily intend for people to read all the way through an article on a country that is hundreds of years old for example. People will skip to particular sections. If someone does want to read through an entire long article, printing it out is probably the most likely option!
32K is far too restrictive for major parent articles - no matter the number of sub articles. Even just including an adequate summary for each sub-topic results in quite a large article - summarising history of a country alone is a massive task, nevermind adding short sections on culture (sports, literature, food+drink, lifestyle), geography, economy, government (!!!). No... any country article below 32K is very likely to not adequately cover the swathe of articles that accompany it.
Zoney
Obviously it depends on the article -- some split well, others would not, and the *size of the split pieces* would matter as well. For example, there's no easy way to split "Albert Einstein" (45K) anymore than it is, as none of the split parts would themselves warrant an article on their own. If you split it up, you'd get a very ugly outline which led to articles each one or two paragraphs long. You could cut it down, but I don't see any benefit in that: we don't need to pretend that everybody is going to *want* to read an entire article from start to finish. I'm sure there are many people who don't care about Einstein's political or religious views, and many who don't really care about the science, but by keeping the text there and well organized, we can let the user skip to their tastes.
There are many summary style articles which are far longer than 32K -- it is not the length that makes them usable or un-usable, it is whether they have a good article structure, with good headings, so you can easily see what parts you are interested in and which you are not.
With that in mind, I think the 32K warning should be pretty soft. Articles should be split up or cut down as a factor of their overall content, which cannot be measured by an arbitrary number of kilobytes. I'm not too worried about people with out of date browsers, I must admit. I wonder how well they fare with the CSS Wikipedia, anyway.
My non-confrontational recommendation:
"Note: This page is 38 kilobytes long. If appropriate, you may want to consider splitting it into a series of shorter articles or editing it to be more concise (see [[Wikipedia:Article size]] for more information)."
I of course say this as somebody who struggles against his natural verbosity, but we all have our biases.
FF
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 23:19:27 +0000, Zoney zoney.ie@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 22:57:53 +0000, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
dpbsmith@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.
So? We don't necessarily intend for people to read all the way through an article on a country that is hundreds of years old for example. People will skip to particular sections. If someone does want to read through an entire long article, printing it out is probably the most likely option!
32K is far too restrictive for major parent articles - no matter the number of sub articles. Even just including an adequate summary for each sub-topic results in quite a large article - summarising history of a country alone is a massive task, nevermind adding short sections on culture (sports, literature, food+drink, lifestyle), geography, economy, government (!!!). No... any country article below 32K is very likely to not adequately cover the swathe of articles that accompany it.
Zoney
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