 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community. |
A tomats is a Wikipedian measurement of text size that compares an article or other document against the length of The Old Man and the Sea. This book contains 26,531 words, roughly the same as Steinbeck's The Pearl, so Wikipedians find it clever to say that an article or discussion is one tomats or one pearl long if it contains around 26,500 words.
In principle, the length of an individual encyclopedia article should fall somewhere in between the length of a single dictionary definition and the length of a book. An individual discussion measured in multiple pearls or tomats is generally considered too long.
| Issue | Summary of arguments |
|---|---|
| Readability | Some believe tightening the guideline will increase readability. Attention span time. The average reading session is below the "don't bother to split"-limit. It is not even 10% of the limits proposed in the earliest "readers may tire"-argument from 2004. Content further down is less likely to be read, but readers can pick out sections they want to read. |
| Comprehensiveness | Some believe there is a trade-off between comprehensiveness and readability, others believe there is no trade-off. |
| Accessibility | Concision is included in dyslexia friendly guidelines and fatiguing conditions. Accessible text should be structured well. This is more challenging with longer articles, especially on mobile, which only allows navigation on top-level headings. Search engines often direct the reader to the main article even when there is a subarticle on the exact topic. Some believe technical issues for readers with slower connections should mean limiting length. |
| Quality | Some believe tightening the guideline will increase quality. |
| Maintenance | Long articles have more content to maintain. On the other hand, when articles are split to resolve length issues, the maintenance load over multiple articles may become even larger. |
| Explicit consensus | It is difficult to achieve explicit consensus on large bodies of text; there is a higher risk of single-authored text that may not reflect consensus. |
| Guideline limits, existing and others (words) | Summary of evidence |
|---|---|
| 8,000-10,000 | Length of journal articles. For attention span, a 2005 study includes this session estimate: 40 minutes x 238 words ~ 10,000 words. . |
| 15,000 | Current guideline. |
| No limit | Some editors believe removing the guideline would increase comprehensiveness. Removing limits reduces rules, Avoid instruction creep, WP:IAR and MOS:BLOAT. |
