Talk:World War II/Archive Length

message: I think that this article should be divided into three or four parts or be categorized to correspond with the article size rule. I don't know how anyone can read an article this long and understand every single section. The discussion page is getting very long as well. I'm glad something is done about this but more work is needed. Sr13 17:59, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Divided chronogically, participant-wise, battles etc.? Do you have one in mind? Oyo321 03:19, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

text: It is World war II. It is big and complicated conflict. There needs to be atleast one article that summarizes it all. Yes its long, but it is justified as WW II was a huge conflict. I agree that there needs to be smaller articles about different parts of conflict. But those articles already exist(European Theatre of World War II, North African campaign, Pacific War etc) So no need to break through opened door. (Staberinde 17:25, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

text: I disagree strongly. I've been reviewing past arguments on the length of the article. World War II is a very, very complicated war. We still have many mysteries that shroud the war, and we continue to uncover new facts unknown before. When the scale of the war becomes as big as World War II, its inevitable. The length of the article is more than acceptable, and I actually think we should work in adding more information into it. I also wish to set a poll, on whether or not we should lengthen or delete some "unnecessary" sections. Oyo321 04:03, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  About the Length of the Article

message: Actually this article is way to short. Covering any part of WWW2 or WW1 would take much more space.
This article is oversized- by toooooooooooooooooooooooo faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!
Do we really need these photos??? 
150px
(((wtf?)))
wow, resistance with army, that will really help me
Rubble, stupefying
Please leave any of your comments in my talk page
Dukakis 22:11, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, sorry, but the normal procedure is to leave responses on the article's talk page. Thanks for showing what you mean, I've just reduced the images to a more reasonable size. I agree with everything you say, except for the the paratroopers -- parachute troops were an important (albeit rarely successful) feature of the war. Grant65 | Talk 04:26, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, aside from seizing vital bridges in Holland in 1940, taking Crete in 1941, protecting the flanks of OVERLORD on D-Day in 1944, capturing the majority of assigned objectives in MARKET-GARDEN,and securing ground on the opposite side of the Rhine in February 1945, paratroops did nothing at all during the war... :-) Michael DoroshTalk 05:39, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

text: I don't think that pic says much about Kursk or the Waffen SS. There are far better pics of both and I would rather have two separate pics than that one. Grant65 | Talk 10:06, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

text: It looks like quite a lot of people, actually. I can only assume that you are accessing it via DSL, because on a dial-up connection it is obvious that the length is totally unacceptable; I just timed it at over seven minutes to load the page. At that speed, most dial-up users will simply abandon this page and seek their information elsewhere, and that is a tragedy because it really is an important topic. And it is a mistake to think that dial-up users are an insignificant minority. -- 144.138.137.22 10:08, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: But if you want to get rid of images, why are you so worried about waiting for them to load? I measure the size of the HTML file to be about 300K, which shouldn't take much more than a minute or so to download over a dial-up connection. Unless you have a very dodgy browser, you should be able to read or edit the text while you are waiting for the images to load or even turn off the images all together. All the images are well labelled, so you can easily pick and chose to manually load ones you are interested in. -- Seth ze 02:36, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

text: OK, but "a reasonably good overview" doesn't require a photograph of diplomats raising a toast, or officers reviewing a parade. It is said "Wikipedia is not paper". True: on paper an image takes the same resources as a few dozen words, on the web an image consumes the resources of not a thousand words, but ten thousand. -- 144.138.137.22 10:08, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The images are all kept in a central repository, so having them on this page doesn't actually consume any additional storage resources. Sure, they can consume additional bandwidth resources, but that's something that a decent browser/cache will minimise. -- Seth ze 02:36, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Erm, no it isn't! See my analysis below -- 144.138.137.22 10:08, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Firstly, your "size" column is just the raw text size. The images are much more significant from the point of view of slow downloads, and this article has double the number of images of the "Condoleeza Rice" article, and nearly double "Byzantine Empire"; the others are tiny by comparison. And if we look at the talk pages, we find that "Byzantine Empire" and "Immigration to the United States" both also have complaints about being too long. I don't know if "Condoleeza Rice" or "Hugo Chávez" do or not; I didn't bother to drill into their dozens of archives of controversy and argument. -- 144.138.137.22 10:08, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: See my comments above. Not sure why you are waiting for the images to download when you are arguing for them to be removed. Just start reading/editing. -- Seth ze 02:36, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Yes, they break it up beautifully. With a total page weight of 1.23 MB, more than 12 times the accepted limit, they put lots of nice blank squares all over the page until long after one has given up on it. You need to at least halve the number of pictures, or else shrink a lot of them to thumbnails. Maps would be a good start; you can barely make the small copies out anyway, so you might as well have thumbnails leading to decent sized ones. Then scrap all the potraits, pictures of diplomats and so. -- 144.138.137.22 10:08, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: So if we halve the number of images, how does that actually help you? What you seem to be complaining about is that the images are taking too long to download, but there should be nothing to stop you reading/editing while you are waiting or simply turning them off and loading them manually if you're interested in a particular image. The images are in fact thumbnails. You could make them smaller, but that would then disadvantage other users. If you can't read a map, click on it to go to the bigger version. -- Seth ze 02:36, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Well, long and influential periods in history, especially ones that redefined society, need long articles. In my opinion, this article barely scratches the surface of WWII. -- THLCCD 03:07, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  ARTICLE IS TOO LONG!!!