Talk:Race and intelligence/Archive 56

message: It seems to me that there are too many archives to this article.  I think that it would be best to reduce the number of archives, and, if possible, include an extended comments page for this article so that newcomers may better navigate through the material within it.  Does anyone else have any ideas about this?  
Also, given the number of archives, and the general length and importance of the material within this article – is it sensible to have the same length rules, etc... apply to this article as would be required to apply to other articles?
--MrASingh 20:56, 23/03/2007, 2007 (UTC)
:One of the possibilities would be to make a series of archives that group content. There would be some danger that someone's contributions could get lost, removed from a standard archive and never placed in the new topical archive. And it is possible that some people might disagree about where something should have been shelved. 
:There are so many archives because people have had so much to say on a very complicated issue. Also, it frequently happens that somebody with no previous experience with an article will have some of the same objections that have already been expressed. If you don't answer the person's objections in a way that can educate the newcomer to common pitfalls, etc., then the person remains angry and may start edit wars. If you do answer the person you can't really do so effectively by telling him/her to do a search of all the past archives and current discussions to see what has already been said on the subject.  
:The length requirement seems to be a recurrent issue. Cavalli-Sforza's book on The History and Geography of Human Genes covers roughly the same topics as the article on Race, but it's nearly 3 inches thick.  So where does one draw the line?  Using hyperlinks it is possible to have a relatively short article that does not leave the reader totally helpless by using unexplained concepts. But it is still a difficult process to reduce things to 32K.  That number, by the way, appears to have been set originally because of the limits of some of the older browsers that simply could not download and process any more information than that. It seems to stand now as an ideal limit. Going to 33k does not provoke much comment. Going to 300k will prompt criticism.  
:Even though Wikipedia is not paper, one of the limitations that we must always be aware of is that many users access materials using a telephone modem, so articles that are long may take a prohibitive amount of time to be downloaded to the user.  One way or another the user needs to be able to download material in digestible volumes. 
:It is, generally speaking, easier to write a 300 page book that gets a certain body of information across in an intelligible way than it is to write a 100 page book.  It takes great skill so say things in a truly economical way. Just being brief won't work if the brief expression of an idea does not enlighten the reader. And just taking a lot of space to say something doesn ensure that you get the idea communicated either. So we balance between ideals and the best job in the real world we can manage. P0M 04:59, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Too many archives