Wikipedia talk:Article size

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Article size page.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6: 2 months

See WP:PROPOSAL for Wikipedia's procedural policy on the creation of new guidelines and policies. See how to contribute to Wikipedia guidance for recommendations regarding the creation and updating of policy and guideline pages.

Adding to table the fraction of articles that fall in various size ranges

The material added here <nowiki> , but twice removed, gives editors a sense of what percentile (so to speak) a given article's size falls into. To me, it helps me envision how much of a "problem" a large article's size is. It certainly doesn't hurt. E Eng 01:15, 20 December 2024 (UTC) Pinging WhatamIdoing.[reply]

Since 30% of all articles are stubs, we should be aiming to create stubs. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 02:08, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I fear I don't see what that has to do with the question at hand. E Eng 02:18, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I take a similar lesson from the percentiles, it seems normal to assume the modal outcome is the expected outcome. The prevalence suggests the goal is <6,000 words. CMD (talk) 02:54, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The only problem with that fine piece of reasoning is that, while 30% of articles are < 150 words, 70% are 150 to 6000 words. Unless I'm badly deceived, 70% > 30%. Or are we defining "stub" using some unspoken criterion different from the 150 boundary? E Eng 04:31, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

How is a rewording of my fine piece of reasoning at all at odds with my original fine piece of reasoning? CMD (talk) 13:04, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

My deepest apologies. I was on my phone and somehow mixed together your post (which refers to sizes < 6000) with Hawkeye's (which seems to be talking about sizes < 150). My head on a platter will be delivered to your home within the next 3 to 5 days. E Eng 21:42, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A merry Christmas platter to us all! CMD (talk) 01:39, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Because WP is dynamic, I don't think adding the percents to the table there is helpful because it does give the wrong impression that certain article sizes are "correct"; but having a statement that "as of 2024, 30% of our articles are < 150 words..." near the table, and which can be updated annually, can give an idea where things sit at the present. --Masem (t) 13:16, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

List of cult films

How can this guideline be applied to lists? It does not seem to have instructions about when to split a list (which would indicate the inverse of how big a list can be). WP:SIZERULE seems focused on word count. I think this guideline had kB-size ranges before, but if it is gone, is kB size irrelevant? I'm asking all this because there is some interest in recombining list of cult films after a big overhaul last year (it has around 2,700 films from at most 20 book references). See discussion here: Talk:List of cult films § Combine pages. Erik (talk | contrib) 14:47, 28 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I did try the Prosesize tool, and here are the results for the T page:

HTML document size: 180 kB
Prose size (including all HTML code): 224 B
References (including all HTML code): 37 kB
Wiki text: 23 kB
Prose size (text only): 102 B (19 words) "readable prose size"
References (text only): 3138 B

The prose size does not seem to consider text in the table, so how can the B/kB values be used to determine an ideal list size? Erik (talk | contrib) 14:58, 28 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Attention span sentence needs an update

I added an 'update' inline tag to this sentence:

A page of about 10,000 words takes between 30 and 40 minutes to read at average speed, which is close to the attention span of most readers.^[1]

The source is from 20 years ago, and since then, attention spans have shrunk with the rise of smartphones and social media [1]. If anyone has a more recent source (preferably from 2023 or later) to update this sentence with, that would be great. Some1 (talk) 01:42, 21 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

^ John V. Chelsom; Andrew C. Payne; Lawrence R. P. Reavill (2005). Management for Engineers, Scientists and Technologists (2nd ed.). Chichester, West Sussex, England; Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. p. 231. ISBN 9780470021279. OCLC 59822571. Retrieved 20 February 2013.

[1] John V. Chelsom; Andrew C. Payne; Lawrence R. P. Reavill (2005). Management for Engineers, Scientists and Technologists (2nd ed.). Chichester, West Sussex, England; Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. p. 231. ISBN 9780470021279. OCLC 59822571. Retrieved 20 February 2013.

[1]