Wikipedia:Article size
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Limits on article size are set by (a) technical issues and (b) considerations of readability and organization.
In the past, technical considerations because of some now rarely used browsers prompted a firm recommendation that articles be limited to a maximum size of precisely 32 KB, 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.
However, there are still stylistic reasons why an article should not be too long. For stylistic purposes, external links, further reading, references, see also, and similar sections; tables, list-like sections, and similar content; and markup, interwiki links, URLs and similar formatting should not be counted toward an article's total size since the point is to limit readable prose. Even so, a warning is displayed when a page exceeds 30KB of text to act as a reminder that the page may be starting to get too long (see MediaWiki:Longpagewarning).
- Tiring to read.
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. Thus the 32 KB recommendation is considered to have stylistic value in many cases; if an article is significantly longer than that, then it probably should be summarized with detail moved to other articles (see Wikipedia:Summary style). For most long pages, division into sections is natural anyway; even if there is no "natural" way to split a long list or table, many editors believe that it should be done anyway, to allow section editing.
- No need for haste.
Do not take precipitous action the very instant an article exceeds 32 KB. There is no need for haste. Discuss the overall topic structure with other editors. Determine whether the topic should be treated as several shorter articles and, if so, how best to organize them. Sometimes an article simply needs to be big to give the subject adequate coverage; certainly, size is no reason to remove valid and useful information.
- Breaking out a controversial section.
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. Consider other organizational principles for splitting the article. Be sure that both the title and content of the broken-out article reflect a neutral point of view.
- A rule of thumb.
Some useful rules of thumb for splitting articles, and combining small pages (see above for what to exclude):
> 50 KB | Probably should be divided (although the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading time) |
> 30 KB | May eventually need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size; this is less critical for lists) |
< 20 KB | Probably should not be divided |
< 1 KB | If an article or list has remained this size for over a couple of months, consider combining it with a related page; this does not apply to a redirect or disambiguation page. Alternatively, why not fix it by adding more info? See Wikipedia:Stub. If it's an important article that's just too short, put it under Collaboration of the Week, a project to improve stubs or nonexistent articles. |
Technical issues
The size of a page in the main namespace (and when not disabled also in the other namespaces) can be found by searching for it (if the search isn't disabled); it is a by-product of that feature (remember to use the Search button, not the Go button!). For long pages it appears also on editing, with the message MediaWiki:longpagewarning:
- WARNING: This page is $1 kilobytes long; some
browsers may have problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb. Please consider breaking the page into smaller sections.
The section editing feature lessens some page length problems as long as each section of a page is within the limit. However, people with slow modems will still have to wait for the entire page to load for them to read it.
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.
Which browsers have problems with long articles?
Current mobile browsers and some older PC web browsers cannot correctly edit long pages because they crop the source text to 32 KB.
The issue has been found in versions of Netscape Navigator up to 4.76 (the latest version is 8.x) and Opera up to version 6.04 (the latest version is 8.x). No other PC browsers are known to be affected. More recent versions should not have this problem. No versions of Internet Explorer for the Mac are affected.
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 you have problems editing a long article
If you have encountered an article that is too long so you can't edit it, or if your browser will chop 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, and there are many other benefits to upgrading- 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, including 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= part of the URL to say §ion=0. 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 Editing of individual sections.
If you find a section too long to edit 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. Filling your request may take from an hour to a week, depending on the response of your fellow volunteer editors.