I just want to clarify my statement that it is best to divide topics into
digestible bits. I think this should only be considered for most articles
once they reach the 20 KB (minus markup) size and the resulting daughter
articles are not stubs. Although some articles demand a larger size just to
summarize all the main points and clearly link to daughters that have move
detail on each of those points.
An example article that I really like in this regard is [[Germany]]
(especially its history secton and the [[History of Germany]] daughter
article):
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany
There the parent article, [[Germany]], has several paragraphs giving a very
broad summary of German history. A prominent link is given to [[History of
Germany]]. The daughter article [[History of Germany]] summarizes each of the
major periods of German history. Each section has a prominent "Main article"
link to grandchildren articles about those specific periods of German
history. And of course any distinct subjects like people, places or things
have inline links to articles on those things.
This is the type of organization I like. However preemptively making stubs to
follow this structure is a really bad thing to do; let each article grow
until it starts to reach a size where readability and editability would be
improved by summarizing certain areas and moving the detail to daughter
articles.
I absolutely /hate/ it when people just cut an entire section out of an
article like ==History== and only leave a [[History of X]] link in that
section. In those cases, it is /far/ better to leave in the detailed history
even if it pushes the article's size way above 32 KB. A summary of the
history must accompany any "main article" link like that, IMO.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)