Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Mccready (talk | contribs) at 12:03, 25 January 2008 (→Central point). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Archiving

I've re-archived this talk page because 1) the old page included a dead/inaccurate link to the first talk page archive, and 2) part of the talk page archive was moved to another article page, which is at MfD. Also, an unsigned quote had been added to the top of the page, which is now archived. Here is the talk page version before I archived. Sandy (Talk) 10:46, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Current status?

It's unclear whether there is still any discussion on this topic at all, or where to contribute if there is. The archived pages suggest severe disagreement with suggested 'enforcement' of guidelines, with apparent consensus to "delete" the entire matter.

My interest has to do with the 'warning' that we receive when working on the Contract_bridge_glossary, that piece being about 153 KB in its socks, as of today. The glossary is a key feature of the Contract bridge Project, and a natural starting place for someone looking into the subject, or simply looking for a reference source. It also operates, to a degree, as a table of contents to the project's work. And it relies heavily on internal linking, by (if I may) definition.

Over the past week I've re-written the in-page links of the glossary, so as to link directly to the terms in question, rather than to alphabetical section heads (e.g., 'ruff' now links to 'Ruff' rather than to 'R'). I've also indicated which links (bold-faced) lead to new pages, whole articles devoted to specific terms and topics, as a notice to dialup viewers.

In practice, this makes the page 'smaller', easier for viewers to work with by far.

As for the subject here—size of pages, especially with regard to browser and internet connection limitations—breaking up the glossary would in practice make the page 'larger', since proportionally more of the links would require loading separate pages, and these when loaded would interact more slowly than by this method.

The question of size here, I think, should focus on the writing, its clarity and conciseness, with clear links to more expanded discussions. If well done, it can result in a form of 'browsing' that loses track of time, or makes the most use of it, as preferred. FutharkRed 05:08, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

It would be helpful if you would provide a link to the article you're discussing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:21, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I do get carried away. Obviously, I should "focus on the writing, its clarity and conciseness", as per my own advice! And obviously, after a while, people lose track of where I started, which was with the Contract_bridge_glossary article way back in the second paragraph. Should I just mention it, as above, or actually link to it, as Contract bridge glossary?

As a comparable matter, The Bridge World online glossary, much more extensive (so far), is split into 24 separate alphabetical pages, with no links at all between definitions, which seriously limits its usability/usefulness/usage--all three. They are considering a change. FutharkRed 09:39, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

A glossary is not intended to be read from start to end. Thus there are no stylistic/readability concerns for the above example. My only concern would be download time for those with slow modems and cell phone browsers. --mav 23:24, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

32KB page size limitations

The article reads that by June 2006, Firefox is the only commonly used browser which cannot handle the bug with pages with more than 32KB of content. At the moment, I don't seem to have such a problem with Firefox (version 2.0) so I think that statement can be removed. Please reconfirm me about this prior to editing the text. huji—TALK 14:26, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

According to the fact that the article itself ruled out the mid-2006 bug with Firefox with Google Toolbar, I removed the statement in question. huji—TALK 18:28, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

"Attention Span"

Unless someone has good evidence that the "attention span" of the "average adult" has an "upper limit" of 20 minutes, that section needs to go. I added quite some time ago, but no further evidence has been forthcoming. In fact, the "attention span" of even the same individual (much less the entire population) varies widely, depending on that person's interest in the subject (as well as external factors, such as fatigue). If an article is interesting and well-presented, it could hold your attention for hours. If not, your attention span could be only a few seconds. Trying to come up with a single metric for "attention span", given the wide variance in Misplaced Pages users, topics, and article quality, is probably not a good way to proceed.

130.126.165.236 22:54, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Good work, I thought the exact same thing when I read it sounded like amateur psychology or some kind of new theory someone was trying out here on WIkipedia. Quadzilla99 06:51, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Okay, it's gone. If someone actually comes up with a credible cite, put it back -- but I don't think that's going to happen. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 130.126.165.236 (talk) 19:21, 27 February 2007 (UTC).

Glad it's gone, never liked it. —Doug Bell  19:29, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Doesn't matter if a cite comes up, honestly. This isn't an article, and attention span is not the best reason to keep articles down to a reasonable size. Mangojuice 20:05, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

A cite is easy to find if you just search for it. Search google for "lecture attention span" and you will find articles like this that describe studies of attention patterns during lecture. Whether wiki articles are similar enough to lecture for the results to carry over is disputable, and whether attention span is relevant to articles is disputable, but there is a kernel of honest research available if you look for it. CMummert · talk 20:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

If you can find a study done with written material on subjects who were actively seeking out the material (rather than being passively subjected to didactic lecture material chosen by someone else) please put it in. I will note that the Lord of the Rings movies seemed to have no trouble maintaining audience engagement, despite being 3 hours+ in length. Besides, there's no law that says you have to read an entire article in one sitting. That's why we (in theory) have sections, right? Misplaced Pages is a reference source, not a novel. 130.126.165.236 21:59, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I would think that that part in the guideline where it says

"Readers may tire of reading a page much longer than about 6,000 to 10,000 words, which roughly corresponds to 30 to 50 KB of readable prose."

should be removed for the same reason. The part that singles out science articles is also unjustified - wouldn't complicated philosophy, or arcane history, be equally difficult to read? CMummert · talk 23:18, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I edited that section to remove the specific reference to science articles. I thought that the old wording was choppy and not in a logical order, so I reordered the section and divided the material into paragraphs more logically. I believe that there is no change in the content or intention of the new wording, just a reordering to make the guideline easier to read. CMummert · talk 15:43, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Biographies - exception to the rule?

I've noticed several biographies that are 100k

I don't really see how one could justify splitting up a biography into smaller portions, as long as the article is all biography. Some people have interesting and varied lives.

If one accepts the arguments above that "attention span" is not really applicable to the wikipedia (and I think the arguments are well made), and that dial-up, as a reason for short articles, is becoming less of a concern, might the wikipedia not at least make an exception to the rule for well-written biographies?

Andysoh 00:16, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

This isn't really a hard and fast rule. It's just a guideline which is probably a good idea, but often isn't. If a long article is good for a topic, then it's good. --Gwern (contribs) 07:11 4 March 2007 (GMT)

Thanks Gwern! When I read the guidelines I found them just a little worrying, hence my slightly defensive comment here... Perhaps someone should add "If a long article is good for a topic, then it's good" into the guidelines for a bit of positive support, or, perhaps as I suggest, expand the 'occasional exceptions' to the guidelines (e.g. add biographies) with any necessary conditions you think important, in some way to make the contributer less worried?

Not to worry, just a thought. Andysoh 21:47, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

How do you find the readable page size?

This page contains the advice: "To quickly estimate readable prose size, click on the printable version of the page, select all, copy, paste into an edit window, delete remaining items not counted in readable prose, and hit preview to see the page size warning."

But where? Where is the page size warning?

qp10qp 05:13, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

The page size warning will be above the edit window, but only if the raw text exceeds 30k. See User:Dr pda/prosesize.js for a javascript tool. Instructions are on the talk page. Gimmetrow 00:40, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

I followed the instructions found in reference 2, but no page length warning appears on the preview page. Perhaps some Wiki code needs to be not deleted for it to function? I had to copy and paste it to an email draft to get the Kb size. The article for psychokinesis gives a erroneous warning for 54Kb, but the body of the article (as I write this) is actually only 13 Kb long. So this warning system is not perfect. 5Q5 14:26, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

I took a look at the article psychokinesis, and copied the source code to a text file on my computer. The number of bytes was 56,262. Seems correct to me. --Mr. PIM 02:31, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

The source code? Try following the instructions given below on this Project page, which is what I flagged as not working. The source code is full of just that: code. Explain why the body of the article quantum physics (41Kb) is at least three times longer than psychokinesis (54Kb)! the Quantum physics article has a small References section, while the one at PK is very lengthy. I think Wiki is miscalculating the extra material in the References on the PK page because it is just outside the {{ }} template tags but still inside the <ref> </ref> tags. The instructions below refer to pasting the material from the Printable version into the Wiki editor and then hitting Preview. When I do that, all I get is the Preview warning, but no length notice above it. Something in these instructions need to be tweaked. Anybody else experiencing this? 5Q5 19:05, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

The MediaWiki message is based on the size of the code, not on the size of the readable prose. —Centrx→talk • 00:12, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Doesn't anyone see the contradiction? The page size warning that appears during a full page edit click refers to the entire source code. But the Project article here says that only the readable prose should be considered for when it's time to split up pages. People can erroneously believe they should begin splitting up an article when the readable prose; i.e., the main body of the article, is not that long because they are considering the source code total, most of which will not print out. This is what is happening at the psychokinesis article, of which I wrote over 95%. It is giving out a consider breaking up warning, even though once all the references and other material are excluded, the readable prose is moderate in size. I just want to point this contradiction out. Being the primary author of the PK page, I will have to deal with people chopping it up when it's far from time considering the length of other articles. Thanks. 5Q5 13:32, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

That's not a contradiction, that's an ambiguity. Many articles exceed the size at which the too-long message is shown, and it is generally understood that is okay. If you want, the size at which the message is shown can be increased. —Centrx→talk • 02:35, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Who reads a 20-page article?

I've been looking at the approximate guidelines and the more I think about them, the more they seem excessively tolerant. In the light of many recent FACs with far more than 60k of prose, even about very narrow topics, it seems slightly absurd that 100k of prose in a single article should be tolerated, no matter the subject. When and why is it reasonable to provide the general readership with 20+ pages of text? I mean, most of all that material is pure nerd padding. It's intended for readers who are already interested in the topic. So what's the justification of forcing everyone to read this nitty-gritty? Why aren't we demanding of those we already know to be patient with the topic to click an extra link or two?

Mind you, these are just the reader issues. There are also really very real editorial problems in managing 60k+ of prose: more edits in certain article histories, greater difficulty in coordinating different sections of an article, greater risk for illicit or false additions to pass undetected for long periods of time, etc.

Peter 16:10, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Pesonally, I don't think there's any "forcing" involved, and I don't really agree with Peter at all - I would suggest it's wrong to say that large articles are mostly "pure nerd padding".

If I'm searching on a subject, a wikipedia article is usually well indexed and I can go directly to the exact part I want. I don't want to be sent round lots of artifically split up sections on different linked pages.

I bet you find Misplaced Pages's prominence is at least in part because it is not a few lines of milch, but real substance.

Personally I think the restrictions should continue to be gradually relaxed, perhaps plus 20k or so on each suggested level.

Andysoh 19:47, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

"A few lines of milch" is the encyclopedic core of a topic, and in commercial encyclopedias years of experience and a wide range general knowledge lies behind the selection of that small kernel of encyclopedic relevance. It also happens to be what most people read and in most cases all that is required. Now, the selection of what to include in the summary can be a risky affair, but it's also so much more satisfying for those who don't have the time to read a monster article that includes too much detail. Most of our most devoted editors are nerds of one kind or another, and I'm certainly no exception. I don't see any point in trying to deny this. And those who generally want to have 20-page articles are those with specific knowledge of topics, not the majority of occasional readers who are just look for a quick insight into the subject.

So, again, why are we making guidelines that are almost guaranteed to encourage articles that cater more to the needs and demands of a minority already blessed either with previous knowledge or patience to read a lot than the majority that doesn't have the time for all those details? And I didn't see a single comments as to some of our biggest and most difficult problems: lack of flow in texts and article cohesion. These problems will only get worst if we tolerate longer and longer articles. Not to mention that the really long articles are usually long only because the editors interested in them are extremely over-represented, now that they're actually more important than other topics. The American Civil War, for example, is not more important than the Middle Ages, even though the main article is almost three times as long.

Peter 13:56, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Hi Peter - OK, no disrespect to those who can summarise a complex topic in a few lines. I'm in favour of summaries of one, two or three paragraphs or more. But I think the wikipedia is beginning to stand out above the standard commercial encyclopedias because it is getting more detailed, e.g., more useful to more people.

I think the opening section of a larger article (that sits under the title alongside the contents listing) should be a very breif summary, covering the content of the article, as far as possible in the order it occurs in the article. This might cause some bigger articles to grow where this is not done, but I think it is good practice.

I think that wiki lore should say that if an article is big (say 30k plus), the opening section should be a brief summary. And it should say it here, for instance.

Perhaps if its 100K plus, wiki lore should recommend that editors consider making the second section, below the content list should be a summary or overview of a size fit for purpose.

Can you assume that a short summary is what most people want? Do you have any surveys which show this?

Such a survey would have to distinguish between people who are just passing through, and people who really value what they get from the article. These people, who really rate the article highly, are likely to have got just that detail from a lengthy article they wanted, that was not previously easily obtained.

I don't think you can prejudge what the reader wants, and I'm sure it doesn't follow that only a minority want a more detailed appraisal of the subject, or that the only people who want or who read the longer stuff are people who already know the longer stuff.

I very much appreciate that the wiki articles I looked up today, (Isaac Newton 48k, Karl Popper 34k) were suficiently detailed to provide the information I wanted, and more accessible, better indexed, with sub heads, etc., as well as linked subjects. There were no text flow problems or lack of cohesion, that you cite. I didn't read the whole article, I was able to easily go to exactly the place I wanted, and found the information I wanted, very well summarised. I haven't seen them, but I think rather than compare the Middle Ages article and the American civil war article as to which one might think is more important, ask whether the article is well written, well presented, the material is relevent, well referenced etc.

I personally would say to the Newton article editors - its good, write more. Andysoh 19:09, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

When and why is it reasonable to provide the general readership with 20+ pages of text?

When the subject demands more than that? Are you seriously arguing that every single human endeavor can be covered adequately in 20 pages? And why on earth would you want to discourage editors and readers with "specific knowledge of topics" from sharing or expanding that knowledge? If you believe that some topics are "underrepresented" or "more important" than topics with longer articles, feel free to expand them.

This isn't a "commercial encyclopedia", and doesn't suffer from many of the limitations of such (e.g., printing costs and physical size).

P.S. the Brittanica article on the American Civil War is 31 pages long, compared to 21 pages for the Misplaced Pages article. So, it appears that the article isn't excessively long even by the standards of "commercial encyclopedias".

130.126.165.236 20:59, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Problems editing a long article

I believe the section Problems editing a long article needs some revision, as the problem is not solely limited to older browsers. I have the very latest, top-of-the-line BlackBerry 8700 and find that it truncates long articles over 32k when doing an edit. The suggestion to avoid the problem by doing section edits is fine, but that solution doesn't apply for an Infobox or lead paragraph edit, nor for vandalism reverts. JGHowes - 02:12, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Add "non-standard browsers" or "browsers on embedded devices" or something. It's not a problem for PCs. —Centrx→talk • 03:07, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Probably off-topic...

...but I'll ask it anyway: how can you determine the size of an article without using an external application? --Howard the Duck 03:02, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

If an article is greater than 32KB a message appears above the edit window if you edit the page. If the page is less than that size, you need to copy and paste to an external program. —Centrx→talk • 20:40, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Page size messages

Someone has changed the messages we get when we edit so that it no longer gives the page size. It was very, very useful to know the size. Does anyone know who changed it and why, or where it was discussed? SlimVirgin 02:05, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

. Rather silly. —Centrx→talk • 23:37, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Manageability

It seems to me that there's a correlation between the degree of jumble and disorganization in WP articles and the length. So it seems that another reason to keep pages short is to facilitate effective communal editing.Ccrrccrr 02:38, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

I personally have not seen any evidence of this. Andysoh 18:29, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Suggest less rigid byte counts

At present, when editing FA status article 'Belgium', one sees "This page is 108 kilobytes long. It may be appropriate to split ...". But let's have a look at the origins of these > 100 KB which according to the guideline "Almost certainly should be divided up":

This character count total of 85 KB does not match the reported 108 KB well (probably having a technical cause like spaces and/or carriage returns not being counted as characters by my editor program, I did not look into it), but I think the general picture is clear: in particlular the exceptionally large footnotes section (more than 90 differently numbered indexes to well over a hundred linked proper references). Since many index numbers are repeated within the article, and each index takes about 4 bytes, the main part of the article is in fact only about 34.5 KB and the footnotes take 33.8 KB. Whereas other references and a 'See also' section can be assumed to serve as "further reading" and thus a normal part of the article, the indexed footnotes for WP:Verifiability and the links to WPs in other languages, together about 36 KB of the 85 KB total, should not be counted as length of an article (unless if purely wikitechnical problems would be caused). I think the project page should explicitly mention such (possibly also for other elements such as the collapsable v.d.e. boxes at the bottom of an article, which usually occur on articles that belong to a much standardized category like here 'countries'). At an earlier FA review, the size had not been considered a problem precisely because of that extremely lengthy footnotes section. — SomeHuman 31 Jul2007 00:35 (UTC)

The recommendations listed on the page here are supposed to be for "readable prose", that is excluding formatting and perhaps footnotes. The software message given when editing a page is only good enough to have a simple bytecount, and oftentimes pages that do have such a large bytecount do warrant splitting up. —Centrx→talk • 03:48, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Article size not indicative of total bytes downloaded

This user's page gives my computer a lot of trouble even though the page is reportedly only 3,365 bytes. In fact, nearly all of that is code for templates which themselves include more templates and images and scripts totaling untold amounts of data. In this particular case, there are hundreds of images associated with that page. --Mud4t 00:33, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Calculation of article size

I followed the instructions in your footnotes and it doesn't seem to work. I couldn't see a thing about article size anywhere. Has this process changed? Fainites 18:12, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Proposed Splitting

I'm gonna suggest that List of placental mammals be split into lists based on each order, with the main page retained as a pointer to all the sub articles. Is there a tempalte to formally propose this? Mbisanz (talk) 07:19, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Shortcuts removed

The shortcuts WP:SIZE, WP:LENGTH, & WP:LIMIT show up as redlinks when they worked yesterday. Any idea what happened? Thanks. -Fnlayson (talk) 22:42, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

• Been added back. Strange.. -Fnlayson (talk) 23:43, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
  • There's been some tweaking of the "WP:" pseudonamespace. It's now a namespace alias to "Misplaced Pages:", see Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)#WP: vs WIkipedia:. There was some slight disruption during the transition, but it seems to have been resolved now. —Remember the dot 02:05, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Upper limit

I know the Guidline proposes an upper limit of 100Kb and mentions that pages over 400Kb might have trouble being displayed and should have arbitrary breaks. It might be nice if this was codified more into a rule like "No pages over xxxKb". Some pages like Line of succession to the British Throne and List of Statutory Instruments of the United Kingdom, 1991 are almost certainly in need of an arbitrary break. Mbisanz (talk) 03:14, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Warning against splitting

Should we warn users against splitting a long article if there's a chance the split article will be deleted? When an article is in one piece, the overall article is governed by WP:N, but the contents are governed by WP:NNC. That means things like Lists of Characters, Episodes, etc. are generally safe if they're part of a whole article that is sourced and notable, but are likely to be AfD'd if they're separated out. I've argued that split articles should be judged for WP:V and WP:N as a whole, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon. Torc2 (talk) 08:05, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Oh good, I pulled up this discussion page just to see of there was mention of this concern. Perhaps it is discussed elsewhere (if so, someone please be so kind as to link to it here), but there does seem to be a conflict of splitting due to size concerns and concerns of notability (particularly in cases of WP:FICT). Since there is no way to tightly link pages with eachother, content can be removed simply because those watching only the main page aren't automatically informed of an AFD for a forked page so they might provide argument for the page's existence. My point is, Some mention of WP:N should be made in the section explaining how/when to split an article. I'm quite confused on WP policy/guideline/consensus on the subject. -Verdatum (talk) 07:11, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Please continue this discussion at ]UnitedStatesian (talk) 20:28, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Central point

The central point of this article needs some work. It currently states

Readers may tire of reading a page much longer than about 6,000 to 10,000 words, which roughly corresponds to 30 to 50 KB of readable prose. If an article is significantly longer than that, it may benefit the reader to move some sections to other articles and replace them with summaries (see Misplaced Pages:Summary style). One rule of thumb is to begin to split an article into smaller articles after the readable prose reaches 10 pages when printed.

The difference between 30 and 50 is large. And there is no guideline as to what significant means. If no one objects I'll try a rewrite of this section in a couple of days. Mccready (talk) 06:23, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

The 30 to 50 range works fine for all purposes I know of; what changes did you have in mind? I think the page is fine. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:34, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

OK yes 30 to 50 is ok but why not limit it to 50 except for the type of cases mentioned. This would be clearer and avoid the need for the ill-defined "significantly".Mccready (talk) 12:03, 25 January 2008 (UTC)