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(a)last-straw.net> asks 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(a)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/