Wikipedia:Summary style: Difference between revisions
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====Keeping summary articles and detailed articles synchronised==== |
====Keeping summary articles and detailed articles synchronised==== |
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Sometimes editors will add details to a summary without adding those facts to the more detailed article. These need to be |
Sometimes editors will add details to a summary without adding those facts to the more detailed article. These need to be moved to the appropriate places in the more detailed article and, if appropriate, summarized in the summary. In other cases, the detailed article may grow considerably in scope, and the summary needs to be re-written to do it justice. These problems may be tagged with {{tl|Sync}}. |
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====Naming conventions for subarticles==== |
====Naming conventions for subarticles==== |
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Revision as of 16:06, 20 February 2007
 | This page documents an English Wikipedia content. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
 | This page in a nutshell: When articles grow too long, longer sections should be spun off into their own articles and a several paragraph summary should be left in its place. Such sections are linked to the detailed article with a {{main|<name of detailed article>}} or comparable template under the section title. To help preserve links to the edit history of the text being moved, it is essential that the edit summary for the creation of the new article that you write links back to the original article. |
Characteristics
| World War II
World War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world ... 1 Causes The war reparations demanded of Germany after World War I ... 2 Prelude to War Resentment of the victorious powers' treatment of the Weimar Republic in the aftermath of World War I... 3 European Theatre The German Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1 ... 4 The Pacific War The Japanese had already invaded China before World War II started in Europe ... |
Wikipedia entries tend to grow in a way which lends itself to the natural creation of new entries. The text of any entry consists of a sequence of related but distinct subtopics. When there is enough text in a given subtopic to merit its own entry, that text can be excised from the present entry and replaced by a link.
Basic technique
Longer articles are split into sections, each about several good-sized paragraphs long. Subsectioning can increase this amount. Ideally many of those sections will eventually provide summaries of separate articles on the subtopic covered in that section (a Main article or similar link would be below the section title—see {{Main}}, {{Details}},...) Each article on each subtopic, as well as the main article have lead sections that are concise encyclopedic articles in their own right.
As a rule, subarticles do not trigger a page size warning, although it is not uncommon for this rule to be broken since the point is to limit readable text, not markup, and sometimes markup may push a page above 32 KB.
Other specifics
Always mention in the edit summary when splitting
Whenever you break up a page, please note the split (including the page names between double square brackets) in the edit summary. Add {{Main}} to the top of the section that is being splitted out, to indicate where the main article for that section is.
Avoidance of POV forks
- See also Wikipedia:Content forking
In applying summary style to articles, care must be taken to avoid a POV fork (that is, a split which results in the original article and/or the spin-off violating NPOV), and/or a difference in approach between the summary and the spin-off, etc. See: Wikipedia:Content forking, Article spinouts - "Summary style" articles.
Where an article is long, and has lots of subtopics with their own articles, try to balance parts of the main page. Do not put overdue weight into one part of an article at the cost of other parts. In shorter articles, if one subtopic has much more text than another subtopic, that may be an indication that that subtopic should have its own page, with only a summary presented on the main page.
Keeping summary articles and detailed articles synchronised
Sometimes editors will add details to a summary without adding those facts to the more detailed article. These need to be moved to the appropriate places in the more detailed article and, if appropriate, summarized in the summary. In other cases, the detailed article may grow considerably in scope, and the summary needs to be re-written to do it justice. These problems may be tagged with {{Sync}}.
Naming conventions for subarticles
Subarticles of a "Summary style" article are one of a few instances where an exception to the common names principle for article naming is sometimes acceptable, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names)#Subsidiary articles.
Nonetheless, also for the subarticles, always choose the simplest article name that is in accordance with Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision).
Unless all sub-articles of a "Summary style" article are truly compliant to the common names principle, it is a good idea to provide a navigational template to connect the subarticles among themselves, and with the "Summary style" main article.
Example of such navigational template, used on subarticles of the "Isaac Newton" article: {{IsaacNewtonSegments}}
Citations and external links
"Summary style" is an excellent technique to give more structure to very long lists of references: for example the "World War II" summary style article portrayed above could have a reference list of sources that treat the history of World War II as a whole, while the sub-articles are provided with references that treat the specifics of each of these subtopics, e.g. books on World War II in the Pacific region are used as reference in the Pacific War article, etc...
There is no need to repeat all specific references for the subtopics in the main "Summary style" article: the "Summary style" article summarizes the content of each of the subtopics, without need to give detailed references for each of them in the main article: these detailed references can be found in the subarticles. The "Summary style" article only contains the main references that apply to that article as a whole.
External links relevant to the subtopic should go in the subtopic article and not the main article.
Lead section
For the planned paper Wikipedia 1.0, one recommendation is that the paper version of articles will be the lead section of the web version. Summary style and news style can help make a concise intro that works stand-alone.
Rationale
The length of a given Wikipedia entry tends to grow as people add information to it. This cannot go on forever: very long entries would cause problems. So we must move information out of entries periodically. This information should not be removed from Wikipedia: that would defeat the purpose of the contributions. So we must create new entries to hold the excised information.
This style of organizing articles is somewhat related to news style except it focuses on topics instead of articles. The idea is to summarize and distribute information across related articles in a way that can serve readers who want varying amounts of detail. Thus giving readers the ability to zoom to the level of detail they need and not exhausting those who need a primer on a whole topic.
This is more helpful to the reader than a very long article that just keeps growing, eventually reaching book-length. Summary style is accomplished by not overwhelming the reader with too much text up front by summarizing main points and going into more detail on particular points (sub-topics) in separate articles. What constitutes 'too long' is largely based on the topic, but generally 30KB of prose is the starting point where articles may be considered too long. Articles that go above this have a burden of proof that extra text is needed to efficiently cover its topic and that the extra reading time is justified.
Sections that are less important for understanding the topic will tend to be lower in the article (this is news style applied to sections). Often this is difficult to do for articles on history or that are otherwise chronologically based unless there is some type of analysis section. Organizing in this way is important due to the fact that many readers will not finish reading the article.
Levels of desired details
Wikipedia is not divided into a macropaedia, micropaedia, and concise versions as is Encyclopaedia Britannica — we must serve all three user types in the same encyclopedia. Summary style is based on the premise that information about a topic should not all be contained in a single article since different readers have different needs;
- many readers need just a quick summary of the topic's most important points (lead section),
- others need a moderate amount of info on the topic's more important points (a set of multi-paragraph sections), and
- some readers need a lot of detail on one or more aspects of the topic (links to full-sized separate articles).
The top or survey article should have general summary information and the more detailed summaries of each subtopic should be in daughter articles and in articles on specific subjects. This can be thought of as layering inverted pyramids where the reader is shown the tip of a pyramid (the lead section) for a topic and within that article any section may have a {{main|<subpage name>}} or similar link to a full article on the topic summarized in that section (see Yosemite National Park#History and History of the Yosemite area for an example using two featured articles). The summary in a section at the survey article will necessarily be at least twice as long as the lead section in the daughter article. The daughter article in turn can also serve as a survey article for its specific part of the topic. And so on until a topic is very thoroughly covered. Thus by navigational choices several different types of readers get the amount of detail they want.
Size
Articles larger than 30 KB (those that trigger page size warning) may be getting too long to efficiently cover their topic. This likelihood increases with larger size and it is very rare for an article 50% larger than this to still efficiently cover its topic.
There are also technical issues with editing articles over 30KB that often lead to duplicated information and poor structure. Few editors will read an entire 50 or 70KB article just to make sure a piece of info they want to put in is not already there. The result is that the information is misplaced, duplicated, or not put in at all.
It is generally considered to be a bad idea to divide an article too hastily. Often the best way to divide an article is to let it grow and then look for sections that could logically be summarized and spun off so the article once again efficiently covers its topic. Interwiki links, along with external links, further reading, references, see also and similar sections should not be counted toward an article's total size since the point is to limit readable prose in the main body of an article.