On 20/10/2007, Phoenix wiki phoenix.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Intersting page; what happened to it? Surely an excellent article can't be short?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Excellent_short_articles
Excellent short articles can be short. There is a quality differential among short articles: some are rubbish (inconcise, badly written, unreferenced, unillustrated, &c.) and some are really rather good (every fact referenced, concise communication covering the breadth of the topic, well written...)
Thinking about science articles in particular, articles about single molecules can sometimes communicate 90% of the information contained in the literature (textbooks and journals) in 10k. The protein Nav 1.5, as an example, deserves an article but has only 11 results in PubMed. If the article is concise (and science can be very concise) but covers the topic well and evenly, I don't see why a short article can't be excellent.