[Wikipedia-l] A quick thought about 1.0

Daniel Mayer maveric149 at yahoo.com
Thu Dec 18 17:58:13 UTC 2003


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. 

>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 
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 
the spun-off bits should be left with links to full articles on those topics. 
That way the reader has a choice to read the summary or to skip right to the 
detail. 

/That/ is far more useful for the reader and also minimizes duplication of 
effort by contributors. I also don't see a problem with this in a print 
version since on-topic summaries would always be left in parent articles 
(detail would be in daughters). 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)





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