Daniel-
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.
When I read an article about a well defined subject, and I want to get all the information about it, I don't click around at all. I just read the article from top to bottom. I might skip a certain section, but I don't need to click anywhere. And when I do use the TOC, it is substantially faster in terms of latency than browsing of separate articles. Not only do I not need to wait for the page to load, I can also easily get context -- information about where I am within the structure of a topic -- simply by scrolling, rather than using back->click->back->click..
If I have an article like [[sports]], after Cunctator split it up into lots of tiny fragments, this possibility is no longer there. To some extent I agree with the split ups, but I find it questionable whether [[professional sports]], [[aesthetic appeal of sport]], [[nationalism and sport]], [[female sport]] etc. should really be separate entries. Even worse is that the article has a long list of "See also"s -- these are one of the worst ways to structure information.
In my experience, separating articles so much also leads to inconsistencies in style and neglect of articles about fringe subjects. For example, I predict that the newly created [[regulation of sport]] will be neglected, while I believe it would not have been if it had been kept as a section within the article. The reason is simply reduced exposure.
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.
I don't accept this as a general rule. It depends on the importance of the reference within each article. If the reference in article C is minor, it may well be completely acceptable to link to a larger article where event B is discussed. But there are of course many cases where for reasons of redundancy reduction this principle applies.
30-40 KB is unreadably long for all but the most important topics ... A max of 15-25 KB minus markup is more readable for most topics.
Well, these are mere statements of opinion. And of course the amount of information that people can stomach in one sitting varies greatly. I do notice, however, that these are not so far apart. If you take my minimum and your maximum and take the average, you arrive at 27.5K, which seems reasonable to me. The sports article is currently a mere 5K, which is IMHO a clear sign that it is far too fragmented. It also has no real summaries of the sub-articles it links to. Overall it gives a very unprofessional impression to me.
I would also probably be very pissed if Cunc had done this, without prior discussion as in this case, to one of "my" articles. One key reason is that the history gets completely lost in the process. Sure, you can still fish it out, but people will assume that Cunc wrote the individual pieces. I have invested many days of research in some articles I worked on, and getting fair credit in the page history is very little to ask for in return. Having a carefully planned out article structure messed up in this way would also make me quite angry. Be bold, but also be respectful toward other people's work.
/That/ is far more useful for the reader ..
I'm glad that you are so confident that you are correct. For me the issue is still quite foggy. While I agree with you that summaries of subsections are useful, I feel they should not be created needlessly. That is, if we're below a certain size -- maybe the 27.5K from above -- we don't need to split the article up unless there is a clear logical separation. For example, in the [[Mother Teresa]] article we split away everything that is about the [[Missionaries of Charity]] (Teresa's order), which is fine with me because there's a clear distinction here. But stuff like "History of .." should really only be split off if we're approaching the size limit, in my opinion. Otherwise the disadvantages of splitting appear to outweigh the advantages.
Regards,
Erik