Erik wrote:
I feel that it is extremely tedious to have to click around many times and load many pages to get a complete picture of an issue, a person etc.
There is little difference between clicking on a TOC link in a huge article than clicking on a link to another article.
I think an article should have as much information related to its title as possible for that reason, and things should only be split off if a certain maximum size is reached (I tend towards 30-40K), or if they are not really related.
I really hate duplication of effort; If article A refers to event B and article C also refers to event B, it is MUCH better to simply have an article about B and short summaries in articles A and C. 30-40 KB is unreadably long for all but the most important topics (such as a major world conflict where simply providing short summaries of the major points would yield an article of that length). A max of 15-25 KB minus markup is more readable for most topics.
It is much better to chop things up into digestible bits. Then summaries of the spun-off bits should be left with links to full articles on those topics. That way the reader has a choice to read the summary or to skip right to the detail.
/That/ is far more useful for the reader and also minimizes duplication of effort by contributors. I also don't see a problem with this in a print version since on-topic summaries would always be left in parent articles (detail would be in daughters).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)