I think there is room for hundreds of thousands of appropriately short
encyclopedia articles in the 100 to 1000 word range.
Fred
However, Erik's constraint that articles
shouldn't be such that they will
always remain stubs would probably disqualify it, if we accept his wish
for articles to be 20,000 to 30,000 characters in length. It is currently
less than 2,000 characters long. It could be expanded using the news
article and whatever is sufficiently trustworthy on the tribute site, and
padded with some relevant background about the school and neighbourhood
and so on, but it would probably still be under 10,000 characters.
But isn't this length business just a matter of personal taste?
Personally, I find long articles quite off-putting. [[Charles Darwin]],
for example, only just barely qualifies as a decently sized article
according to Erik, while I think it could do with being split into
separate sections.
Clearly I don't have Erik's attention span. :) But do we *really* want
articles that are over 10,000 characters long? And if so, why? I'm sure
I'm not the only one who finds it a daunting task to try to edit long
articles, especially if there is major restructuring to be done. If we
want Wikipedia to be open to everyone, and easy to edit, I think we should
seriously consider aiming for shorter articles everywhere. A reader who
wants to read 30K of information about a subject would still be able to;
they'd have to read three articles instead of one, maybe, but it would
only involve two clicks of the mouse...
Oliver