Cunc-
All /I/ know is that I believe I have identified a trend of people editing entries with an eye towards the print version, leading to (imho) astoundingly long and digressive entries which try to fit all the possibly relevant information on one page
Now, now. These are completely different phenomena, and correlation, if it exists, does not equal causation. What you describe is also not "deletionism", as the only thing that is deleted, if anything, is structure in the database. It is arguable whether page titles (not page content) like "Response of the Catholic Church to allegations of child sexual abuse" should really be kept. Normally they are simply redirected.
I oppose splitting articles up into tiny chunks for a number of reasons which I have already given to you. Quoting myself:
- - -
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. 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 long articles. 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.
- - -
Yes, it has something to do with printing also, but not the 1.0 print edition, but printing articles from Wikipedia, whether they are part of 1.0 or not. This is an important application for any article, and splitting things up makes it more difficult.
Regards,
Erik