Board Thread:Wiki Discussions/@comment-1251315-20140625132912/@comment-1207741-20140705233852

The issue is that most of these articles shouldn't be anywhere near as long as they are. Just look at the word-vomit that is Madara's Personality section. You think that section is acceptable so long as the Plot section is moved elsewhere? You clearly don't understand the problem.

As you point out, the wiki shouldn't be replacing the anime or manga. Yet that's what happens when things become too long. It's not simply a matter of size or length but content. Every section of certain articles has too much content, content that gets into meaningless minutiae that conveniently replaces direct enjoyment of the series. If the content in every section is cut back to what's important, the combined sections are shorter and their overall quality improves.

To touch on tabs, or rather to expand on my previous remark, splitting long articles into pieces only enables those pieces to become longer then they previously were. Naruto didn't used to have a section dedicated to his "relationship" with Tenten, but now his subpage does. Clearly, editors of that subpage are filling all the new-found space with anything that pops into their precious heads, no matter how preposterous. If the aforementioned word-vomit of Madara's article is split between four subpages, that only permits the chunks of regurgitated matter to grow larger.

I don't completely dismiss the proposed solutions as non-viable; I think relying more on arc pages could work for certain characters, particularly Naruto. But I would much rather see a genuine effort to solve the size problem by first solving the content problem.

I'll use the Fourth Shinobi World War page as an example: it used to be 112,906 bytes, which made it the fifth longest article on the wiki. Now it's 61,392 bytes. Question: how was this done? Did somebody relocate half the article elsewhere? Answer: there are no subpages, there is not a cheeky link to Shinobi World War Arc. What happened was somebody took the time to shorten the previous content, and now everybody can both have and eat their cake.