Erik Moeller wrote:
I feel that it is extremely tedious to have to click around manytimes and load many pages to get a complete picture of an issue, a person etc. This is even more applicable for printing, of course, but also a general problem. 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 implemented section editing to make it easier to handle longarticles. We will also address the edit conflict issue soon. In terms of linking, would you be happier with long articles if redirects could point to anchors? Then History of sports could redirect to Sports#History. I fail to see which other advantages might be gained from having many small articles on a subject instead of one reasonably large one.
This is a huge drawback and a very strong reason for creating concentrated articles. For example, if I, with your system, is editing an article about say Internet Security and wants to make a reference to ARP Spoofing I wouldn't be able to do that. Since I don't think it would be necessary to describe exactly how the hack is done in the article, I would want to link to another article. But which one? Would it be: [[ARP Spoofing]], [[Address Resolution Protocol]] or [[The TCP/IP Protocl Suite]] (likely a gigantic article)? What would the readers of my article think would be best?
Anchors would partially solve that issue. But you would still have the problem that the paragraph's in [[The TCP/IP Protocol Suite]] probably would discuss ARP Spoofing in a whole different context than the one my readers just left. It would be much better to have it in a separate article which would make it context neutral. However, that easily creates the "man page problem" - information written completely out of context and therefore totally useless to the reader. The only easiy solution to that problem is to repeat and make articles overlap. In that way both views could be satisfied. And there's no shame in redundancy.
Then there is the problems that many writers (like me) have with large articles. The longer the article is, the harder it is to edit. For me the time it takes to edit an article (that I wasn't the orignator of) roughly doubles for each paragraph in the article. I'm not sure why, but with longer articles you not only has to take into consideration the actual text but also the authors flow of language, context, style and so on. For example, check the article History of post-communist Russia and the other articles 172 has written on Russian history. They are great, well worth the read, well written and in general extremely Brilliant Prose. But they aren't edited much. Every part of Russia's/Soviet's 20th century history is surrounded by controversies and political issues. Partisans from all over the world should continually be involved in meaningless revert wars on those articles! But they aren't. Why?
I draw the conclusion that others also feel that long articles are hard to edit.