ConRunner:How to edit an article so long that you can't edit
Limits on article size are set by a) technical issues, and b) considerations of readability and organization.
In the past, technical considerations with some now-seldom-used browsers prompted a firm recommendation that articles be limited to a maximum size of precisely 32KB. With the advent of section editing, and the availability of upgrades for the affected browsers, this hard and fast rule has been softened.
However, do note that readers may tire of reading a page in excess of 20-30 KB of readable prose (tables, lists and markup excluded). Thus the 32KB recommendation is considered to have stylistic value in many cases; if an article is significantly longer than that, then sections probably should eventually be summarised and the 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, it should be done anyway, to allow section editing.
Contents
Restructuring and splitting articles
Do not take precipitious action the very instant an article exceeds 32K. 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.
If you are considering breaking out a portion of the article as a new article, be sure that the portion being split off is just as encyclopedic as the portion that remains. In particular:
- 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 for splitting pages (including lists and tables), and combining small pages:
- >32KB - May eventually need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size; this is less critical for lists)
- >20KB - Might need to be divided (make sure sections are <20K - preferably much smaller)
- <20KB - Probably should not be divided
- <1K - 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 a really important article that's just too short, put it under COTW, a project to improve stubs or nonexistent articles.
See also: Wikipedia:How to break up a page
Technical issues
The size of a page in the main namespace (and when not disabled also in the other name spaces) 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:
| MediaWiki:Longpagewarning |
The specific browsers that have problems with long pages are listed at Wikipedia:Browser page size limits, along with advice on suggested upgrade paths if you have one of these browsers.
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. Note that for a table this is considerably more than the text itself. For example, a table line
Monaco 16000 2 31987
may be coded as
<tr><td>[[Monaco]]</td><td align=right>16000</td> <td align=right>2</td><td align=right>31987</td></tr>
If a table gets too large and splitting up is not desirable one may choose to sacrifice formatting details like "align=right". Do not remove </td> or </tr> tags; MediaWiki will try to clean up after unclosed tags but doesn't guarantee that it'll do what you wanted. Thus it will be reduced to:
<tr><td>[[Monaco]]</td><td>16000</td> <td>2</td><td>31987</td></tr>
Preferably, the new-style table markup should be used:
|- | [[Monaco]] || 16000 || 2 || 31987
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 7.2 or greater) and Opera up to version 6.04 (the latest version is 8 or greater). No other PC browsers are known to be affected. More recent versions should not have this problem.
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.
If it's feasible to do so, the best permanent solution is to upgrade to a more modern web browser. No modern web browsers (as far as we know) 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 32k 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 32k, 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.
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 your fellow volunteer editors.
