Wikipedia:How to break up a page

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 this guideline's talk page.

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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.

Important: Whenever you break up a page, please note the split (including the page names) in the edit summaries.

Articles covering subtopics

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. Some characteristics:

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 Template:Main.)
Each article on each subtopic has a lead section.
As a rule, they 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.

Examples

Cricket, where the page is divided into different subsections that give an overview of the sport, with each subsection leading off to one or more articles covering subtopics and with a large 'See also' section at the end.
History of the English penny, which is part of the 'History of the English penny series', as illustrated by a table on the right hand side of the article.

A smaller number of articles are split into a series of pages. An example of this style is The life of Isaac Newton. In this instance there is one contents page for the whole series of pages.

Balance parts of a page

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.

Articles covering subtopics

Examples

Balance parts of a page

See also