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

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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. EEng 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. EEng 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? EEng 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. EEng 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

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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

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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 outdated as it's from 20 years ago, and since then, attention spans have shrunk (quite significantly?) 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]

(Disclaimer: I always favour large articles) That sentence also seems to presume that people ought to read the entire article, start to finish. That seems like a big assumption to base a policy or guideline on. And I don't think it's a good idea to make scientific arguments in a policy/guideline. Policies and guidelines are instructions and oughts, they don't need to justify themselves in detail. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:28, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That sentence also seems to presume that people ought to read the entire article, start to finish. I agree. I assume most readers probably just skim the lead and then head straight to the sections of the article that interest them. For example, I recently answered a question on a talk page where it seemed pretty clear that the IP had dived straight to the #Marriages section (or at least skipped the preceding sections of the article). And it's not just this Article size guideline, but some other guidelines/MOS also seem to assume that most people read Wikipedia articles from top to bottom or in a sequential manner. Some1 (talk) 14:46, 23 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  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.