Wikipedia:Article size: Difference between revisions

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, it is a by-product of that feature (use the Search button, not the Go button!). For long pages it appears also on editing, with the message:

WARNING: This page is .. kilobytes long; some browsers may have problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb. Please consider breaking the page into smaller sections.

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.

A rule of thumb for splitting a page into smaller pieces, and combining small pages:

• >50-60K lists should be divided
• >32K articles should be divided
• 20K-32K probably should be divided
• 10K-20K consider dividing if the subject conveniently warrants that
• <10K don't bother.
• <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:find or fix a stub.

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".

There have been proposals to support tables better, with a wiki-like syntax, see m:Wiki markup tables; this would also reduce the size of the source text. Also proposed is supporting images so they need less markup to be floated - see meta:image pages.

Large pages: see Special:Longpages

Please split these up according to the rules above.