Wikipedia:Long article layout

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Long article layout is an approach to organizing Wikipedia articles that have grown to a substantial size. As young articles grow in length, they should initially be broken up into sections. As the article continues to grow, it eventually becomes too unwieldy for even the division-into-sections approach. At that point, the article should be broken up into a series of articles (called "sub-articles"), each with a short, useful title, focusing on specific areas of the topic. Typically, this is done by turning each of the original sections into its own article.

The original article (referred to as the "overview article") should be replaced with a summary of the topic overall and summaries of each of the sub-articles.

Note: Don't split a medium length article into a series of stubs unless more information can be added, and the sub articles become a reasonable length.

Long, comprehensive article: Origins of the American Civil War;
In contrast, shorter articles with sub articles: History of the English penny, History of Brazil

Contents

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Overview article

History of Brazil is broken out into an overview article and a number of detailed sub-articles. The overview article should include:

  • A navigation box at the top-right (linking to the sub articles)
  • A "Related topics" section at the bottom (linking to the sub-articles and other articles in the "History of South America" series)
  • A Table of Contents (TOC) which includes the names of the sub articles as top level sections (these link to sections in the current article, with the main article on the topic linked in italics at the top of these sections - see next point)
    • In each section, a summary of the related sub-article, and a link to the sub-article in italics.

See: Wikipedia:Summary style for suggestions on how to style the overview article using Main article: links. You can use this template - Template:Main.

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Sub-articles

The sub-articles include detailed information on a specific area, summarised in the overview article. Sub-articles should include:

  • Navigation box at the top of the article and a table at the end of the article linking to other articles in the series
  • Sections & a TOC (if a sub-article is too short to include sections it probably should not exist)
  • Sub-articles are one of a few instances where an exception to the common names principle for article naming is sometimes acceptable, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names)#Subsidiary articles. Nonetheless, always choose the simplest article name that is in accordance with Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision)
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Elements to address

  • Navigation links between the articles (at the top of each article)
  • previous / next links (at the bottom of each article)
  • Top-of-page introduction paragraphs for each article (above the TOC)
  • Size of each article (make sure it is appropriate i.e. not too small or too large)
  • Guidelines for dealing with Talk pages (i.e. general discussion should occur on the overview article's Talk page)
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See also

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