草稿:Wikipedia:条目长度

本页面用于陈述条目篇幅议题。关于条目篇幅，因收录的格式不同，分成三种衡量方法：

易读的散文篇幅：在一个条目中内文的可阅读文字量，不包括资讯框、表格、列表、引用及注解等。
维基数据的篇幅：在一个条目中记录的数据量，这个数据资讯会在条目的修订历史中显示。
网页数据的篇幅：在一个条目中网页载入的数据量，分成二种层面。一层面是画面实际显示的内容，可用画面留白的空间比例衡量篇幅多寡；一层面是网页实际载入的数据量，当一个条目使用愈多媒体，载入的数据量就会愈大，对部分使用者而言可能需要支付较多的网路费用；对网路速率较慢的使用者而言可能需要耗费更多的页面载入时间。

条目的篇幅会造成多个面向的影响

对读者的影响

注意力：大篇幅的条目需要较多时间阅读，使读者较难保持专注将内容阅读完毕。
可读性：网页实际显示的内容过于密集，资讯量过多时，使整体可读性下降。
文章结构：有些大篇幅的条目具有内容结构不够清晰的问题，使读者较难理解内容的结构或其中逻辑。
资讯超载：大篇幅的条目具有内容过多的问题，使读者在阅读时感到资讯超载。
碎片化：大篇幅的条目内容结构不够清晰时，可能让内容散乱分布于不同段落造成碎片化，使得资讯统整困难。在部分情境中，小篇幅的条目内容短小，收录的资料不完整，需要从其他条目找寻，同样也有资讯统整困难问题。
重复：在单一大篇幅条目的不同段落或复数小条目包含重复资讯时，将造成阅读效率低下，使读者需要耗费更多时间阅读才能得到有效且非重复的资讯。

维护成本
1. 无论是采用原始码编辑或者视觉化编辑，大篇幅的条目因为记录的资讯量较多，维护可能变得费时，也较难以更新资料。当使用原始码编辑时会面临另外一个问题，当所使用的语法较多且复杂时，为了避免语法错误，编辑者需要耗费更多时间在测试原始码上。
2. 当条目内容包含较多重复资讯时，在更新内容或修订时，为了确保所有重复资讯保持一致，维护时间将提升，以致维护成本提升。
3. 当条目内容包含引注炸弹或较多重复引注时，需要耗费较多时间检查来源及内文，以致维护成本提升。
技术问题：例如页面使用过多模板时，将使部分模板不能正常运作。

当条目太大时，请考虑拆分；当条目太小时，请考虑合并。拆分及合并操作有时具有争议，建议发起讨论达成共识，具体的流程请阅读Wikipedia:条目拆分及Wikipedia:合并页面。

Readability

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WP:CANYOUREADTHIS

Each Wikipedia article is in a process of evolution and is likely to continue growing. Other editors will add to articles when you are done with them. Wikipedia has practically unlimited storage space; however, long articles may be more difficult to read, navigate, and comprehend. An article longer than one or two pages when printed should be divided into sections to ease navigation (see Wikipedia:Manual of Style and Wikipedia:Layout for guidance). For most long articles, division into sections is natural anyway. Readers of the mobile version of Wikipedia can be helped by ensuring that sections are not so long or so numerous as to impede navigation.

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] Understanding of standard texts at average reading speed is around 65%. At 10,000 words it may be beneficial to move some sections to other articles and replace them with summaries per Wikipedia:Summary style – see § Size guideline below.

Articles that cover particularly technical subjects should, in general, be shorter than articles on less technical subjects. While expert readers of such articles may accept complexity and length provided the article is well written, the general reader requires clarity and conciseness. There are times when a long or very long article is unavoidable, though its complexity should be minimized. Readability is a key criterion: an article should have clear scope, be well organized, stay on topic, and have a good narrative flow.

Readable prose

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WP:RPS

Readable prose is the main body of the text, excluding material such as footnotes and reference sections ("see also", "external links", bibliography, etc.), diagrams and images, tables and lists, Wikilinks and external URLs, and formatting and mark-up. The measure may substantially underestimate the amount of content in articles that summarize much of their information in tables, especially when these contain notes and explanations in text columns.

XTools shows prose information, including number of characters (under "Prose" in the "General statistics" section). It may be used for an article currently being looked at by selecting the View History tab for the page, then Page Statistics from the line near the top headed External Tools. The prosesize gadget is also helpful for estimating readable prose size.

Lists, tables and summaries

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WP:SPLITLIST

Lists, tables, and other material that is already in summary form may not be appropriate for reducing or summarizing further by the summary style method. If there is no "natural" way to split or reduce a long list or table, it may be best to leave it intact, and a decision made to either keep it embedded in the main article or split it off into a stand-alone page. Regardless, a list or table should be kept as short as is feasible for its purpose and scope. Too much statistical data is against policy.

Maintenance

Wikipedia articles are in constant need of maintenance. This ranges from minor edits correcting spelling and grammar, to major updates reflecting new events and new source material. Some articles may require being rewritten after some time, especially articles created about recent events. It is generally good practice to ensure that articles do not become too long to maintain, especially articles in need of frequent updating. Maintenance can become more difficult when the amount of text on a topic grows, especially when information, possibly with duplicate references, must be maintained across multiple articles.

Technical issues

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WP:CHOKING

Total article size should be kept reasonably low, particularly for readers using slow internet connections or mobile devices or who have slow computer loading. Some large articles exist for topics that require depth and detail, but typically articles of such size are split into two or more smaller articles. 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.

The maximum limit for Wikipedia is via the MediaWiki software's wgMaxArticleSize to 2 MiB (specifically, 2048 kibibytes or 2,097,152 bytes). Exceeding the post-expand limit will result in templates in the article appearing incorrectly.

Size guideline

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Some useful rules of thumb for splitting, trimming or merging articles:

Readable prose size	What to do
> 15,000 words	Almost certainly should be divided or trimmed.
> 9,000 words	Probably should be divided or trimmed, though the scope of a topic can sometimes justify the added reading material.
> 8,000 words	May need to be divided or trimmed; likelihood goes up with size.
< 6,000 words	Length alone does not justify division or trimming.
< 150 words	If an article or list has remained this size for over two months, consider merging it with a related article. Alternatively, the article could be expanded; see Wikipedia:Stub.

Please note: These rules of thumb are intended to be approximate and apply only to readable prose – not to wiki markup size (as found on history lists or other means). Word counts can be found with the help of Shubinator's DYK tool or Prosesize (either as a script or on web version), or by copying and pasting the text (not including references) to a word processor or other tool on your computer that can count words.

The rules of thumb apply somewhat less to disambiguation pages and naturally do not apply to redirects. Readable prose tools do not count words or characters in image captions, lists or tables. When considering splitting list articles, consider the impact of breaking up a sortable table.

Section size

The appropriate length of the lead section depends on the total length of the article. As a guideline, the lead should usually be no longer than four paragraphs; most leads of featured articles are 250–400 words.

Splitting an article

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Very large articles should be split into logically separate articles. Long stand-alone list articles are split into subsequent pages alphabetically, numerically, or subtopically. Also consider splitting and transcluding the split parts (for example with Template:Excerpt).

When splitting a section into a new article, you should refer to the steps in WP:PROPERSPLIT, including an edit summary in the new article attributing the origin of the content to the existing article.

No need for haste

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WP:HASTE

There is no need for haste in splitting an article when it starts getting large. Sometimes an article simply needs to be big to give the subject adequate coverage. If uncertain, or with high-profile articles, start a discussion on the talkpage regarding the overall topic structure. Determine whether the topic should be treated as several shorter articles and, if so, how best to organize them. If the discussion makes no progress consider adding one of the split tags in order to get feedback from other editors.

Breaking out trivial or controversial sections

A relatively trivial topic 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 policy to specifically break out a controversial section without leaving an adequate summary. It also violates that policy to create a new article specifically to contain information that consensus has rejected from the main article. Consider other organizational principles for splitting the article, and be sure that both the title and content of the broken-out article reflect a neutral point of view.

Breaking out an unwanted section

If a section of an article is a magnet for unhelpful contributions (such as the "external links" section or trivia sections), be aware that while moving it to another article may help to clean up the main article, it creates a new article that consists entirely of a section for unwanted contributions. If an article includes large amounts of material not suitable for inclusion in the encyclopedia, it is better to remove that content than to create a new article for it.

Trimming or content removal

Text can be often be trimmed to use fewer words to say the same thing; Some good essays have been written on how to do this, including WikiProject Military history's Copy-editing essentials, User Tony1's redundancy exercises and the Wikipedia:Principle of Some Astonishment. This technique not only leads to (slightly) shorter articles, readability of those articles typically improves.

Removing appropriate content, especially summary style, and/or reliably sourced and non-tangential information, from an article simply to reduce length without moving that content to an appropriate article either by merging or splitting, may require a consensus discussion on the talk page; see Wikipedia:Content removal § Reasons for acceptable reasons.

Markup size

Markup or markup language is the code used to organise a document and make it readable. Wiki markup is the codes used on Wikipedia. Markup size includes readable prose, the wiki codes, and any media used in the article, such as images or audio clips.

You can find the size of the markup of a page in bytes from its page history (near the bottom). Also the search box entry: intitle:Article title will show both number of words in the article and the size of the article in kilobytes. In most cases these are not reliable indications on their own of whether an article should be split.

The largest articles by markup size are listed at Special:Longpages.

Note that the ability to edit a section rather than the entire page decreases wait time, removing some of the many, oversized-page problems for editors; however, readers with slow connections will still have to wait for the entire page to load.

If you have problems editing a long article

If you have encountered an article that is so long you can't edit it, or if your browser chops off the end of the article when you try to edit it, there are a few ways you can solve the problem.

Often, you can edit the article one section at a time by using the "Edit" links you see next to each header in the article. You can edit the article lede before the first section by appending &section=0 to the URL. (See T2156 and two JavaScript workarounds: 1, 2.) You can insert a new section either by using the "+" link (if there is one) in the "Views" section, or by editing an existing section and explicitly adding a second header line within it. If you find a section that is itself too long to edit, you can post a request for assistance on the help desk.

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

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

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