Wikipedia:Summary style: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 23:13, 25 May 2012

This page documents an English Wikipedia editing guideline.

Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page.

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This page in a nutshell:

Sections of long articles should be spun off into their own articles leaving summaries in their place.
Summary sections are linked to the detailed article with a {{Main|<name of detailed article>}} or comparable template.
To preserve links to the edit history of the moved text, the first edit summary of the new article links back to the original.

World War II article in summary style
World War II World War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world .... Causes Main article: Causes of World War II The war reparations demanded of Germany after World War I .... Prelude to war Main article: Events preceding World War II in Europe Resentment of the victorious powers' treatment of the Weimar Republic in the aftermath of World War I .... European Theatre Main article: European Theatre of World War II The German Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1 .... The Pacific War Main article: Pacific War The Japanese had already invaded China before World War II started in Europe ....

Wikipedia articles tend to grow in a way that lends itself to the natural creation of new articles. The text of any article consists of a sequence of related but distinct subtopics. When there is enough text in a given subtopic to merit its own article, that text may be summarized within the present article. A link should then be provided to a more detailed article about the subtopic.

The length of a given Wikipedia article tends to grow as people add information to it. This does not go on forever: very long articles would cause problems. So we move information out of articles periodically. In general, information should not be removed from Wikipedia: that would defeat the purpose of the contributions. So we create new articles to hold the excised information.

Size

Articles over a certain size may not cover their topic in a way that is easy to find or read. Opinions vary as to what counts as an ideal length; judging the appropriate size depends on the topic and whether it easily lends itself to being split up. Size guidelines apply somewhat less to disambiguation pages and to list articles, especially if splitting them would require breaking up a sortable table.

Basic technique

Longer articles are split into sections, each usually several good-sized paragraphs long. Subsectioning can increase this amount. Ideally many of these sections will eventually provide summaries of separate articles on the subtopics covered in those sections. Each subtopic or child article is an encyclopedic article in its own right and contains its own lead section that is quite similar to the summary in its parent article. A link such as "Main page: Wikipedia:Splitting", generated by the template {{Main|<name of child article>}}, would be placed below the section title of the summary in the main article.

References

Each article on Wikipedia must be able to stand alone as a self-contained unit (exceptions noted herein). The verifiability policy requires that all quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged be attributed to a reliable, published source in the form of an inline citation. This applies whether in a parent article or in a summary-style subarticle.

Other specifics

Avoiding unnecessary splits

Shortcut

WP:AVOIDSPLIT

Editors are cautioned not to immediately split articles if the new article would meet neither the general notability criterion nor the specific notability criteria for their topic. Instead, editors are encouraged to work on further developing the main article first, locating coverage that applies to both the main topic and the subtopic. Through this process, it may become evident that subtopics or groups of subtopics can demonstrate their own notability, and thus can be split off into their own article. If information can be trimmed, merged, or removed, these steps should be undertaken first before the new article is created.

Notability guidelines only outline how suitable a topic is for its own article or list. They do not limit the content of an article or list. If possible, split the content into logically separate articles. If necessary, split the article arbitrarily. Long stand-alone lists may be split alphanumerically or chronologically or in another way that simplifies maintenance without regard to individual notability of the subsections (common selection criteria: lists created explicitly because most or all of the listed items do not warrant independent articles; short, complete lists of every item that is verifiably a member of the group). However, a split by subtopic is preferable. Judging the appropriate size depends on the topic.

Always mention in the edit summary when splitting

Whenever you break up a page, please note the split (including the subtopic page names between double square brackets) in the edit summary. Add {{Main}} to the top of the section in the parent article to indicate where the detailed article for that section is.

Avoidance of POV forks

In applying summary style to articles, care must be taken to avoid a POV fork (that is, a split that results in the original article or the spinoff violating NPOV policy), a difference in approach between the summary and the spinoff, etc.

Note that this doesn't mean that an article treating one point of view is automatically considered a POV fork. The best example is The Holocaust, which has a split or spinoff to Holocaust denial.

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 undue 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 synchronized

Shortcut

WP:SYNC

Sometimes editors will add details to a summary section without adding those facts to the more detailed article. To keep articles synchronized, editors should first add any new material to the appropriate places in the detailed article, and, if appropriate, summarize the material in the summary section. In other cases, the detailed article may grow considerably in scope, and the summary section will need to be rewritten to do it justice. These problems may be tagged with {{Sync}}.

To eliminate this maintenance burden, editors can use partial transclusion as explained at Wikipedia:Transclusion#Partial transclusion. However, discussions in 2010 highlighted issues with viewing historical renditions of the main page (the partial transclusion will be from the current subpage, which may even have been deleted). Therefore it seems to be recommended to use this process only with consensus and when articles are rapidly evolving.

Naming conventions for subarticles

Subarticles (not to be confused with subpages) 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.

Subarticle navigation

Unless all subarticles 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 both among themselves and along with the summary-style main article.

An example of such a navigation template, used on subarticles of the Isaac Newton article, is {{IsaacNewtonSegments}}.

Lead section

For 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 as a standalone.

Rationale

This style of organizing articles is somewhat related to news style except that 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 details, thus giving readers the ability to zoom to the level of details they need and not exhausting those who need a primer on a whole topic. Breakout methods should anticipate the various details levels that typical readers will look for.

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 details on particular points (subtopics) in separate articles. What constitutes "too long" is largely based on the topic, but generally 30KB of readable prose is the starting point at which articles may be considered too long. Articles that go above this have a burden of proof that extra text is needed to efficiently cover their topics 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 because many readers will not finish reading the article.

Levels of desired details

Shortcut

WP:DETAIL

Wikipedia is not divided into a macropædia, micropædia, and concise version, as is the Encyclopædia 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 information on the topic's more important points (a set of multiparagraph sections), and
some readers need a lot of details on one or more aspects of the topic (links to full-sized separate articles).

The parent article should have general summary information and the more detailed summaries of each subtopic should be in child articles and in articles on specific subjects. This can be thought of as layering inverted pyramids where the reader is first shown the lead section for a topic, and within its article any section may have a {{Main|<subpage name>}} or similar link to a full article on the subtopic summarized in that section (for example, Yosemite National Park#History and History of the Yosemite area are two such related featured articles). The summary in a section at the parent article will often be at least twice as long as the lead section in the child article. The child article in turn can also serve as a parent 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 each get the amount of details they want.

@@ Line 46: / Line 46: @@
 ===Avoiding unnecessary splits===
 {{Shortcut|WP:AVOIDSPLIT}}
-Editors are cautioned not to immediately split articles if the new article would meet neither the [[WP:GNG|general notability criterion]] nor the specific notability criteria for their topic. Instead, editors are encouraged to work on further developing the main article first, locating coverage that applies to both the main topic and the subtopic. Through this process, it may become evident that subtopics or groups of subtopics can demonstrate their own notability, and thus can be split off into their own article. If information can be trimmed, merged, or removed, these steps should be undertaken first before the new article is created. Long stand alone lists may be split alphabetically or chronologically or other way which simplifies maintenance without regard to individual notability of the subsections, see [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (long lists)]], however a split by subtopic is preferable.
+Editors are cautioned not to immediately split articles if the new article would meet neither the [[WP:GNG|general notability criterion]] nor the specific notability criteria for their topic. Instead, editors are encouraged to work on further developing the main article first, locating coverage that applies to both the main topic and the subtopic. Through this process, it may become evident that subtopics or groups of subtopics can demonstrate their own notability, and thus can be split off into their own article. If information can be trimmed, merged, or removed, these steps should be undertaken first before the new article is created.
+[[Wikipedia:Notability|Notability guidelines]] only outline how suitable a ''topic'' is for ''its own article or list''. They ''do not'' limit the ''content'' of an article or list. If possible, split the content into logically separate articles. If necessary, split the article arbitrarily. [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (long lists)|Long stand-alone lists]] may be split alphanumerically or chronologically or in another way that simplifies maintenance without regard to individual notability of the subsections (common selection criteria: lists created explicitly because most or all of the listed items do not warrant independent articles; short, complete lists of every item that is verifiably a member of the group). However, a split by subtopic is preferable. Judging the appropriate size depends on the topic.
 ===Always mention in the edit summary when splitting===

Wikipedia:Summary style: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 23:13, 25 May 2012

Size

Basic technique

References

Other specifics

Avoiding unnecessary splits

Always mention in the edit summary when splitting

Avoidance of POV forks

Keeping summary articles and detailed articles synchronized

Naming conventions for subarticles

Subarticle navigation

Further reading/external links

Lead section

Rationale

Levels of desired details

See also

Templates