This page contains an overview of the key issues concerning article size. There are three related measures of an article's size:
- Readable prose size: the amount of viewable text in the main sections of the article, not including tables, lists, or footer sections
- Wiki markup size: the amount of text in the full page edit window, as shown in the character count of the edit history page
- Browser page size: the total size of the page as loaded by a web browser
Usability considerations concerning the size of an article have been determined to include:
- Reader issues, such as attention span, readability, organization, information saturation, etc.
- Editor issues, such as talkpage tension, 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, even though there is still information on the topic that could be contributed
- Other technical issues, such as limitations of mobile browsers.
When an article is too large, consider breaking it into smaller articles, spinning part of it out into a new article, or merging part of it into another existing article. When an article is too small, it may be merged with one or more other existing articles. Such editorial decisions require consensus. Guidelines on the size of articles, and detailed solutions, are provided below. The licensing policy mandates that whenever any content is copied from one article to another new or existing article, an edit summary containing the required copy attribution must be used.
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. Wikipedia has practically 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. Readers of the mobile version of Wikipedia can be helped by ensuring that sections are not so long or so numerous as to impede navigation.
At 10,000 words (50 kB and above) it may be beneficial to move some sections to other articles and replace them with summaries per Wikipedia:Summary style – see Size guideline (rule of thumb) below.
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. There are times when a long or very long article is unavoidable, though its complexity should be minimized. Readability is a key criterion.
Quantifying article size
Wikisource size
Wikisource is the behind-the-scenes version of an article, in which its actual words are intermixed with special codes and symbols (called markup) which indicate section headings, footnotes, placement of images, and so on; it is what editors see and change in the edit box.[1] The "size" displayed in an article's edit history is the size of its wikisource, and is
- not the amount of readable prose in the article;
- not the bandwidth cost of accessing the article;
- not the "size" or "length" of the article; and
- completely irrelevant to the question of splitting the article.
Readable prose
Readable prose is the main body of an article's text, and excludes material such as footnotes, references, tables, image captions, See also, and so on. The prosesize gadget gives an article's readable prose size both in characters and in words.
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 page.
Technical issues
Total article size should be kept reasonably low, particularly for readers using slow internet connections or mobile devices or who have slow computer loading. 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. Some large articles exist for topics that require depth and detail, but typically articles of such size are split into two or more smaller articles.
Mobile browsers can be a problem if these devices have little memory and/or 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. 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.
If your browser chokes when you try to edit a large article, upgrade to a new browser. Or you can edit just a single section by clicking the "Edit" link in the section header. (Editing the article lead requires a trick – seeEditing before the first section.) You can post a request for assistance on the help desk; click the "New section" or "+" link.
The maximum limit for Wikipedia is set by the MediaWiki software default article size limit, 2048 kibibytes (specifically, 2,097,152 bytes).
Exceeding the post-expand limit will result in templates in the article appearing incorrectly.
Splitting an article
Very large articles should be split into logically separate articles. Long stand-alone list articles are split into subsequent pages alphabetically, numerically, or subtopically. Also consider splitting and transcluding the split parts (for example with Template:Excerpt).
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 permit modification and reuse but require attribution of the content contributors, the new page should be created with an edit summary attesting proper copy attribution, such as "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. The {{Copied}} template can also be placed on the talk page of both articles.
No need for haste
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 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 topic 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 also violates 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 large amounts of material not suitable for inclusion in the encyclopedia, it is better to remove that content than to create a new article for it.
Content removal
Removing appropriate content, especially summary style, and/or reliably sourced and non-tangential information, from an article simply to reduce length without moving that content to an appropriate article either by merging or splitting, may require a consensus discussion on the talkpage; see Wikipedia:Content removal#Reasons for acceptable reasons.
See also
- Special:LongPages
- Wikipedia:Abundance and redundancy
- Wikipedia:Article series
- Wikipedia:Content removal
- Wikipedia:Database reports/Long pages
- Wikipedia:Database reports/Long stubs
- Wikipedia:Database reports/Talk pages by size
- Wikipedia:Featured articles/By length
- Wikipedia:Out of scope
- Wikipedia:Template limits
- Wikipedia:Too much detail
- Wikipedia:Writing better articles#Stay on topic
References
- ^ Unless they're using the WP:Visual editor, which no one does.