Wikipedia:Article size
 |
This page documents an English Wikipedia editing guideline. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
 |
This page in a nutshell: Articles should not be either too big or too small. |
| Wikipedia guidelines |
|---|
| Behavioral |
| Content |
| Discussion |
| Editing |
| Organization |
| Style |
| More |
| List of policies and guidelines |
This page contains an overview on issues related to article size, which can be broken down into the following categories:
- reader issues, such as readability, organization, information saturation, attention spans, etc.
- editor issues, for example talkpage tensions, arguments over trivial contributions, debates on how to split up a large article, etc.
- contribution issues, such as articles ceasing to grow significantly once they reach a certain size – this does not imply, however, that there is no more information on the topic to be contributed
- technical issues, for example, browser limitations, upload speeds, cellular connections, etc.
Contents |
Readability issues
Each Wikipedia article is in a process of evolution and is likely to continue growing. Other editors will add to articles when you are done with them. This is not a technical problem, because, for most practical purposes, Wikipedia has unlimited storage space; however, long articles may be more difficult to read, navigate, and comprehend.
An article longer than one or two pages when printed should be divided into sections to ease navigation (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style and Wikipedia:Layout for guidance). For most long articles, division into sections is natural anyway. A page of about 30 to 50 KB, which roughly corresponds to 6,000 to 10,000 words of readable prose, takes between 30 and 40 minutes to read at average speed, which is right on the limit of the average concentration span of 40 to 50 minutes. At 50k and above it may benefit the reader to consider moving some sections to other articles and replace them with summaries per Wikipedia:Summary style - see WP:SIZERULE for "a rule of thumb". Comprehension of standard texts at average reading speed is around 65%.
Articles that cover particularly technical subjects should, in general, be shorter than articles on less technical subjects. While expert readers of such articles may accept complexity and length provided the article is well written, the general reader requires clarity and conciseness. Most articles do not need to be excessively long; however, there are times when a long or very long article is unavoidable, though its complexity should be minimized. Readability is a key criterion.
Measuring "readable prose" size
"Readable prose" is the main body of the text, excluding material such as: footnotes and reference sections ("see also", "external links", bibliography, etc.); diagrams and images; tables and lists; Wikilinks and external URLs; and formatting and mark-up.
The following script is helpful for estimating readable prose size: User:Dr_pda/prosesize.
Lists, tables and summaries
Lists, tables, and other material that is already in summary form may not be appropriate for reducing or summarizing further by the summary style method. If there is no "natural" way to split or reduce a long list or table, it may be best to leave it intact, and a decision made to either keep it embedded in the main article or split it off into a stand-alone sub-article. Regardless, a list or table should be kept as short as is feasible for its purpose and scope. Too much statistical data is against policy.
Technical issues
In the past, because of some now rarely used browsers, technical considerations prompted a strong recommendation that articles be limited to a strict maximum of 32 KB (~5 pages) in size, since editing any article longer than that would cause severe problems. With the advent of the section editing feature and the availability of upgrades for the affected browsers, this once hard and fast rule has been softened and many articles now exist which are over 32 KB of total text size.
Even so, the total article size should be kept reasonably low, because many users edit from low-speed connections including dial-up connections, smartphones, and low-end broadband connections. The text on a 32 KB page takes about five seconds to load for editing on a dial-up connection, with accompanying images taking additional time, so pages significantly larger than this are difficult for older browsers to display. Articles of about 200 KB (~30 pages) are not uncommon for topics that require depth and detail, but it's typical that articles of such size get split into two or more sub-articles.
Mobile browsers can be a problem because these devices usually have little memory and a slow CPU; long pages can take too much time to process, if they can be fully loaded at all. When using slow connections, e.g., a desktop computer with an analog modem dial-up or the wireless connection of some mobile devices, long articles can take too much time to load.
Very long articles
With some web browsers with certain plug-ins running in certain environments, articles over 400 KB may not render properly or at all. If possible, such very large articles should be split. If possible, split the content into logically separate articles. If necessary, split the article arbitrarily. Avoid arbitrarily splitting mainspace articles unless there is a demonstrated technical problem loading the page on at least one major browser. If you do split an article arbitrarily, be careful to link the resulting parts to each other. For non-mainspace articles, consider splitting off the top and bottom parts of the article and transcluding them into the split parts. See Wikipedia:List of missing journals for an example of an arbitrary (alphabetical) split with a transcluded top part. Be careful with transclusion in mainspace articles, as it may confuse inexperienced editors who make subsequent edits.
Web browsers which have problems with long articles
Under certain environments, Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 6 are known to have difficulty loading articles over about 400 KB.
For notes on unrelated problems that various web browsers have with MediaWiki sites, and for a list of alternative browsers you can download, see Wikipedia:Browser notes.
Splitting an article
When you split a section from a long article into an independent article, you should leave a short summary of the material that is removed along with a pointer to the independent article. In the independent article, put the {{SubArticle}} or {{Summary in}} tag on the talk page to create a banner that refers back to the main article.
To conform with Wikipedia's licensing requirements, which not only permit modification and reuse but also require attribution of the content contributors, the new page should be created with an edit summary noting "split content from [[article name]]". (Do not omit this step or omit the page name.) A note should also be made in the edit summary of the source article, "split content to [[article name]]", to protect against the article subsequently being deleted and the history of the new page eradicated.
No need for haste
As browsers have improved, there is no need for haste in splitting an article when it starts getting large. Sometimes an article simply needs to be big to give the subject adequate coverage. If uncertain, or with high profile articles, start a discussion on the talkpage regarding the overall topic structure. Determine whether the topic should be treated as several shorter articles and, if so, how best to organize them. If the discussion makes no progress consider adding one of the split tags in order to get feedback from other editors.
Breaking out trivial or controversial sections
A relatively trivial fact may be appropriate in the context of the larger article, but inappropriate as the topic of an entire article in itself. In most cases, it is a violation of the neutral point of view to specifically break out a controversial section without leaving an adequate summary. It may also violate the neutral point of view policy to create a new article specifically to contain information that consensus has rejected from the main article. Consider other organizational principles for splitting the article, and be sure that both the title and content of the broken-out article reflect a neutral point of view.
Breaking out an unwanted section
If a section of an article is a magnet for unhelpful contributions (such as the "external links" section or trivia sections), be aware that while moving it to another article may help to clean up the main article, it creates a new article that consists entirely of a section for unwanted contributions. If an article includes an unwanted section, or unwanted information, it is better to remove that content than to create a new article for it.
A rule of thumb
Some useful rules of thumb for splitting articles, and combining small pages:
| Readable prose size | What to do |
| > 100 KB | Almost certainly should be divided |
| > 60 KB | Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading time) |
| > 50 KB | May need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size) |
| < 40 KB | Length alone does not justify division |
| < 1 KB | If an article or list has remained this size for over a couple of months, consider combining it with a related page. Alternatively, why not fix it by adding more info? See Wikipedia:Stub. |
- Please note:
These guidelines apply somewhat less to disambiguation pages and naturally do not apply to redirects. They also apply less strongly to list articles, especially if splitting them would require breaking up a sortable table.
How to find articles by size
The 1000 largest articles are listed at Special:Longpages.
You can find the size of the markup of a page in bytes from its page history (near the bottom). Also the search box entry: intitle:Article title will show both number of words in the article and the size of the article in KB. In most cases these are not reliable indications on their own of whether an article should be split.
Note that the ability to edit a section rather than the entire page decreases wait time, removing some of the many, oversized-page problems for editors; however, readers with slow modems will still have to wait for the entire page to load.
You can set your preferences (by changing the "Threshold for stub link formatting" under the "Appearance" menu) to make links to pages smaller than a certain size appear in a different colour. "Size" in this context means the size of the source text seen in the edit box.
If you have problems editing a long article
If you have encountered an article that is so long you can't edit it, or if your browser chops off the end of the article when you try to edit it, there are a few ways you can solve the problem.
The best permanent solution is to simply upgrade to a more modern web browser, if possible. No major modern web browsers have this problem on their recent versions, and there are many other benefits to upgrading to their latest version: more recent versions will be considerably more secure, will do a better job displaying content written to more modern HTML (and other standards), and will have fixed many bugs, besides this one. Many articles on Wikipedia are going to be longer than 32 KB on a permanent basis, so you will continue to have occasional problems with article length as long as you are using an older browser.
As a temporary solution, you should be able to edit the article one section at a time by using the "Edit" links you see next to each header in the article. This should work as long as none of the sections are longer than 32 KB, which they really shouldn't be. You can edit text before the first section by editing the first section, then changing the §ion=1 part of the URL to §ion=0. (See bugzilla:156 and two JavaScript workarounds: 1, 2.) You can insert a new section either by using the "New section" link (if there is one) in the "Views" section, or by editing an existing section and explicitly adding a second header line within it. See also Section editing and Editing before the first section.
If you find a section too long to edit correctly and safely, you can post a request for assistance on the help desk. Follow the "New section" link, which will allow you to post a new comment without editing any existing text.
See also
- Wikipedia:Abundance and redundancy
- Wikipedia:Article series
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style (summary style)
- Wikipedia:Splitting
- Wikipedia:Template limits
- Help:Archiving a talk page
- Help:Section
- Long pages report
|
