Occasional exceptions

In such cases, the article should none the less be kept short where possible. Major subsections should use Summary style where a separate article for a subtopic is reasonable, and the article should be written with greater than usual attention to readability.

Readers of such subjects will often expect them to be involved, and will often accept this, provided the article is well written, created with a sensible structure and style, and is an appropriate length for the topic. However, long and very long articles should nonetheless be avoided where possible, and their length or complexity minimized where not. Encouragement of overly long articles is not stylistically desirable as a general rule, and most articles do not require such length. Readability is still the key criterion.

Technical issues

Reading long pages can also be problematic in a mobile browser because these devices usually have little memory and a slow CPU, and therefore long pages can take too much until they are loaded.

Long articles can take too much time to load when using slow connections, e.g. a desktop computer with an analog modem dialup or the wireless connection of some mobile devices.

Current mobile browsers and some older PC web browsers cannot correctly edit long pages because they crop the source text to 32 KB.

Which browsers have problems with long articles?

This last issue has been found in versions of Netscape Navigator up to 4.76 (the latest version is 8.x) and Opera up to version 6.04 (the latest version is 9.0). No other PC browsers are known to be affected. More recent versions should not have this problem. No versions of Internet Explorer for the Mac are affected.

There is currently, as of 2006 June, a problem with the latest version of Firefox when combined with the Google toolbar. See the Bugzilla case for more information.

For notes on unrelated problems that various web browsers have with MediaWiki sites, and for a list of alternative browsers you can download, see Browser notes.

Splitting a page

No need for haste

Do not take precipitous action the very instant an article exceeds 32 KB. 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. Sometimes an article simply needs to be big to give the subject adequate coverage; certainly, size is no reason to remove valid and useful information.

Breaking out a controversial section

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

Some useful rules of thumb for splitting articles, and combining small pages (see above for what to exclude):

How to find long articles

The size of a page in the main namespace (and when not disabled also in the other namespaces) 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 longpagewarning – for example:

The section 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.

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.

The best permanent solution is to simply upgrade to a more modern web browser, if possible. No major modern web browsers (with the current (as of 2006 June) exception of Firefox and the Google Toolbar, see above) 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 32 KB 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 32 KB, 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. (See 156 and two javascript workarounds: WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Edit Top, WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Add edit section 0.) 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. See also Section#Editing of individual sections.

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 of your fellow volunteer editors.

Notes