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Wikipedia:Article size



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)
> 40 KB May eventually need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size)
< 30 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 lists or disambiguation pages, and naturally do not apply to redirects.

How to find long articles

The 1000 largest articles are listed at Special:Longpages.

You can find the size of a page in the main namespace (and when not disabled also in the other namespaces) by searching for that page - remember to use the Search button, not the Go button!.

For pages longer than 32K, the size of the page is displayed when editing, with the message MediaWiki:Longpagewarning – for example:

This page is 37 kilobytes long.

The ability to edit a section rather than the entire page lessens some of the wait for editing, thus lessening some page length problems, provided that each section of a page is within the limit. However, people with slow modems who want to read a page will still have to wait for the entire page to load.

You can set your preferences 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 &section=1 part of the URL to &section=0. (See bugzilla:156 and two javascript workarounds: 1, 2.) You can insert a new section either by using the "+" 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 Village Pump. Follow the "post" link for the assistance section, which will allow you to post a new comment without editing any existing text. Answering your request may take from an hour to a week, depending on the response of your fellow volunteer editors.

Notes

  1. ^ a b Specifically, for stylistic purposes, readable prose excludes: External links, Further reading, References, Footnotes, See also, and similar sections; Table of contents, tables, list-like sections, and similar content; and markup, interwiki links, URLs and similar formatting. 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.
  2. ^ Some multi-line text box controls, used by browsers to show the edit page, have a hard coded limit of 32kB

See also




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