[Wikipedia-l] Monolithic articles vs parents and daughters

[Daniel Mayer]

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)