On Thu, Dec 18, 2003 at 09:58:13AM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Erik wrote:
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.
For me there's a huge difference. My latency on wikipedia is usually between 5 and 10 seconds. OTOH I have high bandwidth. So I would greatly prefer to download a huge article at once.
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 really hate duplication of effort; If article A refers to event B and
Why is this duplication of effort? We can simply copy-paste from one article to the other.
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. 30-40 KB is unreadably long for all but the most important topics (such as a major world conflict where simply providing short summaries of the major points would yield an article of that length). A max of 15-25 KB minus markup is more readable for most topics.
It is much better to chop things up into digestible bits. Then summaries of
I would characterize it as an information dump which forces the reader to make an effort to extract a coherent picture out of it. Further, it is often not possible to deduce what is the topic of the article in an outgoing link (the link text is usually a single word), so I click something and find its not what I wanted and get annoyed.
Arvind