Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 15:06, 9 December 2006

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• Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Extra-Long Article Committee/Origin

Origin of project

This project essentially developed from various talk page discussions, such as here, here, here, and at the Village pump, and particularly at Misplaced Pages talk:Article size a discussion now archived above. --Sadi Carnot 12:59, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

ELAC userbox

Once you begin to participate in the project please feel free to paste an ELAC userbox to your user page using the following code:

{{User WikiProject Extra-Long Article Committee}} Template:User WikiProject Extra-Long Article Committee

ELAC issues list

Aside from those listed on the ELAC report list, here are few issues or concerns users have reported to us:

GABA A receptor

• GABA A receptor - 167kb

Note: I wish we could prove it, but this one has clear copyvio problems. Patstuart 17:25, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

We'll have to look into this; it looks like last month this article was only two page long (click here) Thanks: --Sadi Carnot 17:49, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

It looks like User:Dr inkfish did a 150kb paste (45pgs) on Nov 29. There was also a major deletion by User:58.78.199.193 on Nov 12. I suggest we revert back to Nov 09 (the original three page version). Any objections? Including myself, User:Patstuart, and the two people on Talk:GABA A receptor, there seems to be a consensus to revert the paste. I will tag that article for now and post a note to User:Dr inkfish. Thanks: --Sadi Carnot 19:16, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Question

At exactly what point does it go from "We strongly recommend you split up the page" to "You must do it now or we will do it for you"? -Amarkov _edits 15:30, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

At this point, being that this project is young, and from the consensus of the archived and related talk pages, there is not yet a final uniformly agreed upon decision in regards to these few and unlikely types of junctures. If a page of editors strongly resists committee attempts to improve the size of the article, I would suggest that these articles go into a special ELAC category list in which further discussion would entail as to what would be the best direction to follow. This will have to be a learn-as-we-go process. If a committee team faces severe resistance, it would be a good idea to retreat on that particular article, for a time, until a better plan or more consensus is formulated. --Sadi Carnot 15:56, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

One possibility would be to start with the longest item (a list) and break it up. Then the next and so on. This group would gain experience, face smaller resistance with lists, and by the time you got to non-lists, the argument that "this is the longest on wikipedia" would carry considerable weight. 4.250.201.99 22:17, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, this is a good idea. Presently, there are about 700 articles over 85kb, 80 over 150kb, and 17 over 200kb with the longest being List of states in the Holy Roman Empire at 256kb. I would suggest that as a present reasonable goal, we work to get all lists below 150kb and all articles below 85kb. This should keep us busy for a while. Any comments? --Sadi Carnot 23:23, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

A list namespace would be cool. Oh, you meant related comments? -Amarkov _edits 23:26, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

What do you mean "list namespace", like a page showing the list of all the lists at Misplaced Pages? --Sadi Carnot 00:21, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Category namespace = Category:blah, template namespace = Templah:blah, list namespace = List:blah. Or more succinctly, WP:NAMESPACE. --TheParanoidOne 06:31, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Difference in approaches

In some articles, the contributors seem to want to cut them down. My example is George W. Bush, which seems to want to prune itself. In other articles, the people seem hostile. So should I add Bush to the list? -Patstuart 20:08, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, this is a good I idea, add it to the list; however, we will need more team members before we tackle the Bush article. As I recall, it is the most edited (or viewed?) article in Misplaced Pages. In general, I would suggest that any article in the Top 700 longest article group (aside from lists) is fair game for committee action. I would suggest that the ELAC focus should be on cutting rather than pruning. Once an article is cut up, people can separate per topic of interest and prune away on those separated side articles. The “pruning effect”, however, usually subsides once article division is achieved, where afterwards the “growth effect” takes over again. --Sadi Carnot 20:37, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

This group's efforts will be seen as a threat if it deletes content; therefor I recommend that regardless of what may be eventually deleted, this group solely concern itself with breaking up big articles into smaller articles and leave deleting to efforts outside this group's charter. 4.250.201.99 22:23, 6 December 2006 (UTC) (WAS 4.250)

Yes, of course. I’ve done my fair share of page breakups, and we always make it very clear that nothing gets deleted during the process, i.e. except for trivial duplicate words or sentences, little grammar details, continuity flow necessities, etc. The main problem is not with the potential for losing material, but rather with the loss of the bonding “effect” of having everything one page and similarly all the editors on one talk page. Some editors, for example, may have just spent the last three months building up an article with material and references, etc., and by no stretch of anyone’s imagination do they want do see their special article broken up into pieces. The real issue is getting all of the regular editors to come to an agreement or understanding that this is just one article out of 1.5 million plus total article and that it needs to be broken up for the sake of the reader and for the sake of having a uniform encyclopedia. --Sadi Carnot 23:43, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

The "long article vote" template.

I don't see how this is going to work. The only way I can see to implement it, barring changes in thesoftware, would be to link up a pageview counter. Unfortunately, all pageview counters I can find are copyrighted, and the only ones that have any sort of license for use without payment require putting up ads for the site as part of the agreement. I tried to see if I could get anything by tweaking around with the HTML code for forms, but I'm not sure how much of it Mediawiki handles, and I'd need developer access at the least to set it up properly, anyway. I've done a bit with JavaScript, but I don't think it has enough functionality for full GUI stuff, and there's still the problem of actually storing the results, which I can't do. So someone's going to have to think up another plan, unless I missed something. -Amarkov _edits 23:12, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Amarkov, I really don’t know how to do it myself either, but I sure where there’s a will there’s a way. With almost 3 million registered Wikipedians, I’m sure that someone around here knows how to do it. My plan is to find someone who knows how; although it may talk some time. I’ve left a message on Jimbo’s talk page; hopefully he’ll have some input for us. In the mean time, do you know of anyone might be able to do the coding, i.e. possibly something like they do at Misplaced Pages:Statistics? --Sadi Carnot 23:32, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Hm, Misplaced Pages:Statistics didn't occur to me. Regardless, I still think there are going to be technical impossibilities. If I actually had a working, public domain pageview counter to start with, I could probably get it to work, but I don't, and I'm not sure there are any. -Amarkov _edits 23:38, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

That's a good idea, if we could set up a visitor statistics counter for both the YES and NO pages of each long article we decide to poll, then we could have a crude vote counting method. We'll have to dig around for a counting program. Can you do it with something like this? --Sadi Carnot 23:49, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Not that I can see. That gives the graph of overall activity, which, although interesting, isn't what we want. Just a public domain hit counter, that shows like "XXXX views", is the only way I can see to do anything easily. -Amarkov _edits 23:58, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

We'll have to work on this week-by-week. One thing to note, is that we have to code the vote counter so that the random overzealous user isn't aloud to submit multi-votes, which thus skews the poll. I've set up many online voting polls, such as this one, and I've seen this happen where one person will submit 20-30 votes in one sitting. --Sadi Carnot 00:17, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

WP:MfD

I urge sensible people to prod this page. Best, Ghirla 07:56, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

What the heck are you talking about? -Amarkov _edits 15:11, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I can only say this is the most logical project that came to be lately. The articles on WP are too long and for one to read a 50kb+ article it is impossible to remember more than 10% of what you read in one sitting let alone skipping parts that are just pure prose and no pictures. We need this, I don't know how it will be percieved but anyway, it will have its use in the future. Lincher 00:46, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you Lincher, I agree with you. It looks like Ghirlandajo won't be contributing to the project? He has a bunch of 180kb+ archived talk pages; maybe he likes long articles as well? --Sadi Carnot 05:21, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I see this page is an exercise in trolling. Please stop chit-chatting and start writing articles. That's what we are all here for. --Ghirla 09:28, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Again, what are you talking about? Patstuart 15:17, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

looking at the longest

Looking at the longest, they are are not really that long, but they are large--usually from incorporating tables, which add greatly to the KB count. If this were 3 years ago, I'd suggest table-free versions for slow web browsers. But this is not quite as necessary now, and we should find some way of distinguishing them so they don't show up on our lists if no work is appropriate.DGG 05:36, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Also, a lot of the longest articles are lists some of which I think would be less useful if they were split up. For instance I think List of states in the Holy Roman Empire could benefit with being broken up into smaller articles whereas List of Formula One drivers (a featured list) is best left alone. CheekyMonkey 12:31, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Treading carefullly

This committee could become a bad guy real quick, if we're not careful about how we start and go through with the process. -Patstuart 15:21, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

A way to manage that is to add citations and then making well cited sections that can later become a subpage. In doing that we create a better cited article, a longer article (for adding citations will make it longer) and having more concise articles. (Ex : George W. Bush) Lincher 20:41, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Out of date

A lot of the sources cited on this page seem to be rather out-of-date, dating back to 1997/1998 or even earlier. That may not seem like a long time ago, but in Internet terms that is a geological age away from where we are today. For example "the average user still has a 28.8Kbps modem" is nonsense; we should certainly still cater for 56Kbps dial-up speeds but these statements are placing an unnecessary emphasis on download time. I'm not aware of any more recent studies, but I'd be very surprised if the number one complaint of Web users is still the download time of pages. The download time of files, by all means – programs and videos tens of megabytes in size – but not a page of 50Kb or so. I agree that articles should be kept short, absolutely, for reasons of clarity, readability, structure and the ability of average reader to get through the thing, but let's not place too much emphasis on "technical limitations" with ever-decreasing significance – Gurch 15:06, 9 December 2006 (UTC)