Board Thread:Wiki Discussions/@comment-1251315-20140625132912/@comment-1207741-20140706193655

I trimmed Naruto's Abilities section a while back, taking it from 176,524 bytes to 154,688 bytes. And that was just by trimming one section. Imagine what difference might be made if the rest of the article was trimmed? The summary alone of his actions from Shinobi World War Arc onwards is a third of the article. A summary of a quarter of the series taking a third of the space? That's a problem.

And, more or less, I believe the trimming was quite effective. Compare what I did to the current version. Have there been additions? Yes. Have there been restorations of stuff I intentionally removed? Sure; the Taijutsu section is the most noticeable victim of that. But a good percentage of what now makes the article longer is from new content, as in, stuff that has happened in the series since the trimming was done.

The reason trimming has a bad track record is not because it doesn't work or is inherently flawed, but because nobody wants to do the work. There are lots of people willing to add information, there are lots of people willing to revert those additions, but there are remarkably few people willing to do anything with information older than a week. People are quite perceptive of when articles or sections become too long, but generally they're only willing to point out the problem and hope somebody else does something about it. That's why tabs appear such a lucrative alternative to trimming; anyone who knows how to cut and paste can implement tabs in ten seconds.

Another way in which trimming reduces load times: if there's less content, people can't stuff as many image into the article and the overall page size is reduced. If I save Naruto's page, it's 5.16 mb, of which about 3 mb is just from images. So there's that.