Since my joining of this wiki not so long ago on the first day of November last year, I have always believed that there are a select few pages on this wiki who are far too long to load for those with poorer browsers, and far too intense for many readers to read in full length, and far too wordy for us to pick out all mistakes on the page.
The last time I made this comment was actually my first ever talk page post on this wiki, which demonstrates the importance I attached to it in my mind. It was posted on the wiki's longest article, Aang. The (short) section can be found Talk:Aang#Too Long. Unfortunately, the reaction to my comments was far from positive. I was roundly criticised by both Zero and Alex101313 (but I should note that I don't hold it against them). Worse, I was never given the chance to argue back because the discussion was closed before I came back from inactivity later in November. So I gave it up for the time being.
The demotion of Aang as an A-class article and recent comments on Talk:Waterbending have finally led me to write this blog. I have chosen to use blogs rather than a forum because of the wordiness of my views on page lengths on this wiki. (It is more of an essay than a comment.) We need to face that fact. Our audience is not necessarily as qualified at English as we are. I'm quite sure that they do not have an attention span like we do. We need to take our audience and readers into consideration. Long pages also have technical issues. Older browsers simply can't handle pages too much longer than 60kb.
So I believe change is needed in this regard. This is my proposal.
- No page may be longer than 60kb. This is the ceiling for most older browsers.
- Pages that are too long will be split.
- However, page length is not grounds for removing content. Content can be moved, but not deleted.
For example, currently, Aang is split into the main article, Aang (Games) and Aang's Relationships. It should be split into quite a few pages. Here's how I would envision it by the time the movies are released:
- "Aang" (basic summarial history info, personality, skills)
- "History of Aang, Season 1"
- "History of Aang, Season 2"
- "History of Aang, Season 3"
- "Aang's Relationships" (relationship page, already exists)
- "Aang (Films)" (for when the films are released)
- "Aang (Games)"
- "Aang (Production Information)" (for real-world info such as voice actor etc.)
I would be confident that all of these pages would be of quite a reasonable length, and I am sure that aside from production information, all of these pages would make into the double digits of kb, especially the first six. This would mean that we keep the viewers happy, and we boost our article count without compromising the quality of the pages.
I would be happy to hear your views on the affair.
Amendment[]
The history article titles should be:
- "History of Aang (12 BG - 100 AG)" - early life, season 1
- "History of Aang (Spring 100 AG)" - season 2
- "History of Aang (Summer 100 AG)" - season 3
This is to keep them in-universe.