Yet another of my brainstormed ideas, though actually I think a user suggested this to me a while back. Haven't thought about it much until recently...
I've noticed a lot of wikis (though not all that seem to need it) like to separate some of the sections in their longer, "larger" articles into sub-pages in this format: "[article name]/[section name]". So for example, if we took Po's page and separated the Biography section from it, the new sub-page would be titled "Po/Biography".
Benefit
Supposedly this kind of organizing helps the page to load better by decreasing the article's byte size. This list of long articles shows the large articles we currently have, as well as their byte sizes. If I remember right from something I read, I think anything past 30 KB (30,000 bytes) should try to be shortened because they'll not do as well on older computers. Therefore, this would be a good method for shortening articles.
Setback?
However, what I wonder the most about (other than the amount of work it will take) is how readers will treat this separation of info. If we implemented this, there could be two kinds of readers:
- Those that click somewhere to view the information they're looking for, but find out they have to take an extra step and go somewhere else to view it, and then click away from the site/page;
- Those that click somewhere to view the information they're looking for, see that it's been moved somewhere else, and then click on the provided link with the hope that there will be plenty of the info they were looking for.
The latter is, in my view, the ideal reader for any kind of website; the former, however, is the reality. When searching up information, most people want to have that information right there in front of them as soon as they've done the one, single, required step to obtain it. Sad to say, but taking an extra step is not ideal for most people, and the odds of them taking that extra step are quite low.
Therefore, by separating section information from the main article, it could decrease the odds of people viewing the article--or in a worst-case scenario, the entire wiki.
For discussion
I'm not that sure of my opinion on this, which is why I'm posting about it. What do you think about branching out long articles? Will it actually help the wiki? Would it be worth the time to move stuff around?
EDIT: Right off the bat as I finished typing this: An alternative would be to have a "condensed" version on the main article, and then have the longer one on the sub-page. It would be more work, but if the concern is about how readers will treat the article information, then this may be more helpful than just moving all the content to another location.