Wikipedia talk:Too long; didn't read

message: WP:TLDR used to link to the GFDL text.  There were no links to the shortcut at the time, but it is a good example. ←BenB4 04:16, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Redirects and content length

message: That's not a policy. Merzul (talk) 19:06, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Increasingly, it's being treated as if it were one.Skookum1 (talk) 17:18, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  GFDL??? 

message: before running their company into a technical sinkhole. I think managers either should consider reading Leo Tolstoy as an exercise (or the modern alternative Robert Jordan), in order to get into the Wikipedia culture accordingly. "Too long; didn't read" can only be defended if the text is larger than 200 kb (or maybe 1 Mb). By nature an encyclopedia contains lots of texts, and so do the talk pages. ... said: Rursus (mbork³) 08:06, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Wow, Rursus, I'm 1.5 years late to this talk thread, but amen, brother, amen. I agree with your quantitative threshold value, and I *definitely*  agree about being pushed down into sinkholes from above by PHBs. Who even cares, as long as it's quick enough, right? But the worst version is the slow-motion-nightmare variant. The variant where the bad is what you're swimming in—been ubiquitous for years—and the worst can be constantly seen waiting on the horizon, in all its splendid inevitability and darkness. Except by the blind, who don't see no evil; whatchu talkin bout, egghead? I speak from experience. The answer is the ejection seat, which removes one from a context and places one in another. The only complication is when the ejection seat isn't available ready-made and thus must be cobbled together in-flight from scarce spare parts. It takes so fuckin long. But keep your chin above the sewage; for at the flight's destination, greater darkness awaits. — ¾-10 15:20, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Manager philosophy

message: Just thought this little bit of wisdom would fit nicely in this essay. What does it mean? "Be clear!" Hires an editor (talk) 21:09, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Eschew Obfuscation 

message: Various improvements made on 03:29, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Noting changes

message: I can't help but smile for the fact that this page's "nutshell" abstract is simply "This page in a nutshell: Be concise." Now I'm having a meta moment. I'm sure it's superfluous to point this out (y'all noticed it too, probably), but I just couldn't help sharing my amusement. — ¾-10 19:05, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Meta moment

message: Sometimes, for a talk page post, I write at length but concisely. Sometimes, I get TLDR back. I think there's a misunderstanding about TLDR that should be addressed or clarified in the essay. It's now only subtly hinted at and evidently it gets missed.
This is an example that would be appropriate for TLDR if it were much longer:
 The edits were bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad,
 bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and bad.
But this should be okay even if proportionate for length:
 The edits were bad because they were ungrammatical,
 POV, copyright infringement, a personal attack,
 and out of context.
The second example is 18 words long and the first example is only 17 words long, but, if both were a thousand times longer, the first one likely would deserve TLDR but the second one likely would not because it's proportionately informative.
Before marking a post as TLDR, consider whether it's long or it's long but still informative relative to its length.
Also consider that taking on a subject may require reading long texts, including hardcopy books. If someone doesn't want to read that much on the subject, perhaps the subject is not an appropriate choice for that person.
Thoughts on addressing or clarifying this in the essay? Nick Levinson (talk) 07:05, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't see this talk thread until today, about 6 weeks after Nick posted. But all I can say is, "Amen, Nick—amen." Today I just said about the same thing in my reply nearby below in another thread. One corollary is that the people you have to explain this to are the people who were not capable of figuring it out on their own, which may or may not say anything about whether they're capable of having it explained to them. And there's always going to be more of them. So don't let it get you down too much. But anyway, you're right—the better we can handle this topic in the essay, the better off we'll be. Doing it concisely is a challenge (how meta). — ¾-10 18:16, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you. Any debate from any editors? If not, I'll probably edit the page soon. Thanks. Nick Levinson (talk) 20:02, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  length due not to content but to bloat 

message: "The latter is a common cognitive problem for all human minds, which are faced with the task of sensing the many facets of a complex reality and modeling it in a way simple enough for the consciousness to understand and easily manipulate in interrelation with yet other topics. This leads humans toward certain analytical weaknesses that have been explored through observations both an.......... . . . . . .as selectively as each one may wish."
Seriously, TLDR. 84.159.81.31 (talk) 15:39, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Was this a prank? A very good example of TLDR. There was actually some content in it. I read it and wrote a summary and deleted the original. --Kvng (talk) 13:19, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Extensive babbling on brain functioning 

message: Short Brigade Harvester Boris, I know you hate reading more than 2 or 3 lines, but I would hope that you'll read the following, which is as short as possible to communicate the ideas. I saw your recent addition at "...and intelligently differentiating the cases is seldom a facile affair (or as Strunk and White would recommend, "...is not always easy"). You're right that that's an acceptable alternative thing to say, but note that it doesn't say the *same* thing, either connotatively or even denotatively (although it's acceptably similar). But there *are* [some] cases in life where maximum precision is needed to dig down to the whole truth. You're right that loquaciousness is probably more often *not* positively correlated to reading comprehension, compared statistically to the cases where it is. But it is equally true that procrustean terseness is most often *not* positively correlated to reading comprehension either—in my experience, including in my day job, it's much the opposite; although the procrustean operators themselves are oblivious to what it is among the connotative and denotative details that they're missing or inappropriately devaluing/deemphasizing. In other words, they're improving the text *as far as *they* can tell*, where "as far as they can tell" = sometimes not far enough. I admit, though, that it is fair (and necessary, though time-consuming) to ask oneself whether, in each unique case, a *little* sacrificing of fine shades of distinction is "worth it" because the accessibility of the communication has been improved *a lot*. That's where *I* could find improvement, I think (in *some* cases—although not as many as procrusteans think). I empathize with Pascal's comment in that respect—the fine shades of distinction aren't lost on me, so I tend to underappreciate the extent to which they're "clogging up the communication" for others (who they probably *are* lost on). It doesn't mean that those shades are nonsense; it doesn't mean that they aren't necessary to the *whole* truth; it just means that most readers would have to spend too much time and effort to absorb them. In other words, humans most often don't have time for the whole truth, and an acceptable approximation is better for practical purposes. But I speak from business-world experience when I say that in a context where author and reader are equals in terms of what their time is worth, it can easily be said that in a case where the details have turned out (usually on postmortem) *not* to have been negligible after all, it is the *reader* who was, and is, being too lazy. (Compare contexts in which we say that the author is being too lazy.) I spend my days explaining to people at the postmortem stage the exact, analyzed details of how they didn't bring enough intelligence or knowledge or attention or diligence to the table, and the work that they were working on is scrap because of it. I think the big difference, which I will try to keep in mind on WP, is that in a context like an encyclopedia, nearly all of the responsibility for time and effort is on the author, not the reader. And I can only hope that you've been gracious enough to have read this far, because there's some important truth herein that is missed if not. But "oh well" either way; the world keeps turning regardless of what any one person hasn't read. — ¾-10 14:44, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't see the difference between "...is seldom a facile affair" and "...is not always easy," other than the first being stilted and the second being direct. While arguing for verbosity and complex constructions you may want to consider this. Regards, Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 15:35, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text:  The following is not an insult, just a part of reality: the fact that you can't see the difference reveals a flaw in you, not me. I'm truly not being facetious or snippy. If you'd like me to explicate the difference so that you can see it, I will do so, but I'll refrain unless you ask, because I do realize that you probably don't want to read that explication. Not everyone who goes around WP slashing others' writing adequately understands that which they are slashing. That's not a comment about you (I haven't studied your contributions history enough to know), it's just a comment about anyone who misapplies or overcorrects on the ONW or TLDR front. — ¾-10 16:26, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text:  The link is good in various ways, and I do appreciate the ONW principle when it's properly applied. I just find that many of the people who angrily or snarkily harp on it (overemphasize it) have an emotional axe to grind that often seems to boil down to "you're not as smart as you're trying to seem, and I'm very smart (in fact, smarter than you) and you should explicitly acknowledge how smart I am." In fact, if you read that link again through those eyes, you see that the whole thing, emotively, is not so much about how smart anyone actually is, as about dos and donts for displaying how smart you are, or trying to highlight how smart you are, or trying to look smart, or to avoid inaccurately looking less smart than you actually are. The whole thing reeks of insecurity (of the type that lashes out maliciously to tear others down in order to achieve apparent relative height) when smelled through those nostrils. This type of insecurity seems to me to be on a different (parallel, simultaneous, meta) channel from the content being discussed, itself. It's on an alternate frequency that's more about positioning and elbowing for social pecking order than it is about the ideas being discussed. But some of us are honestly not worrying about how smart we can manage to seem, or about failing to showcase our smartness. In some cases we're just trying to dig down to truths in a complex world where half-truths are prevalent. — ¾-10 16:41, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I surrender. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 17:08, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Various facets on both sides of same stone; and differentiating cases (b/c cases not lump-able)

message: tl;dr  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.198.16.211 (talk) 07:06, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: TL;DR

message: I take issue with this. Shakespeare didn't say "Brevity is the soul of wit." Polonius said it. You can't prop up somebody (in this case Shakespeare) as an authority on something and assume that the opinions of his characters are the same as his own. Doing that makes no sense.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.1.147.76 (talk) 19:07, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: You're right; the aphorism (or saying) is venerable, but it shouldn't be mentioned in a way that seems like an appeal to authority with Shakespeare as the focus. I'm going to rephrase that spot. Thanks for the suggestion. — ¾-10 21:32, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: The Shakespeare Quote

message: *...if you're hasty and harsh enough, you could end up earning a reputation for yourself as someone with incompetent reading comprehension, which you may know is an unfair reputation, but which your actions will speciously make seem like the truth.
: I feel this sentence is too wordy, and with too many big words ("speciously" being the worst offender) for this particular essay.  86.41.46.205 (talk) 08:11, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text:  Good critique. I refined it as follows: I split the one long sentence into two related short ones, and I gave the wiktionary link for the [relatively] big word. Thus it now reads: "[…] if you're hasty and harsh enough, you could end up earning a reputation for yourself as someone with incompetent reading comprehension. You may know that this is an unfair reputation, but your actions may speciously make it seem true to others." — ¾-10 01:03, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  A sentence in need of refining 

message: Per the thoughts expressed above in "Propose Deletion" I have boldly renamed this "Please be concise" and added a (hopefully) more gentle lede. The intent is to convey the same message in friendlier terms. In addition (ironically?) I found opportunities to tighten up the writing a bit. Nobody Ent (Gerardw) 18:25, 25 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't see your reasons as good enough to justify the page move without any discussion.  --SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:04, 26 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree.  I've undone the move.  I also undid some (but not all) of the other changes; in particular restored the more gentle (!) earlier version of the "maintain civility" section.  I like the addition of the Pascal quotation. Jowa fan (talk) 10:46, 29 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moved 

message: From the article: "Sometimes the writer is an academic whose occupation requires obscure, genre-specific jargon to impress his or her peers and justify additional funding. They don't necessarily know how to turn it off on Wikipedia, or even that they should."
I love this!  I was reading a medical article a few months ago that was part jargon-speak and part plain speech.  I looked at the Talk page where I found a message from someone complaining that the most recent revision had dumbed down the article to the level of a "layman's encyclopedia."  Well, duh....
Rissa, copy editor (talk) 04:45, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Verbosity 

message: Many editors still redirect users whenever possible to this page claiming that their time is "too valuable" and that they have "other things to do" rather than attempting to debunk any arguments presented to them if the body of text is too large, in fact I even wonder if such an essay should exist as despite warning against editors not to use this for ridicule, it's almost exclusively used for ridicule. Ahoy, --42.114.33.55 (talk) 06:59, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Regardless of the text... 

message: (JUST KIDDING. Please do not take it seriously.)
The article saying avoiding to be too long is too long. So let's see the Chinese version:
:The article is longer, the number of readers who are willing to read will be smaller, despite articles, policies, essays or talks. So:
:* It's not suitable to make the article too long; (Notice that a new long article may be suspected to be a copyright violation.)
:* Shorten policies and essays for reading easily;
:* Don't put lengthy speeches (Sometimes someone may disrupt the discussion on purpose). It will make others confusing, or be off topic.
:If it's necessary to write long texts, you should:
:* Divide texts into several paragraphs properly in articles. Add proper links, pictures and tables in order to lighten the feeling of boredom.
:* Use special formats such as bullets or bold fonts in policies, essays or talks to make Wikipedians understand faster and more clearly.
:;Example
:* The English version is too long.
:* The Portuguese version is much shorter.
--逆襲的天邪鬼 (talk) 06:31, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article is too looooooog 

message: Shakespeare, William (1992), Hamlet, ... New York
Is that really the right way to cite Shakespeare on Wikipedia? Mhkay (talk) 14:36, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shakespeare Citation 

message: It'd be helpful to have an essay that says something along the lines of "if it's not excessively long, you have some responsibility to read a discussion to familiarize yourself with the context before voicing your opinion (and if you don't have anything to add or the requisite expertise, sometimes it's better to stay silent)". Does an essay along those lines exist? (Please ping me if you reply. It'd be helpful to hear nos, not just yeses, since if there are nos I'll write it myself.)  talk 19:07, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Update: I've written it at Wikipedia:Read before commenting. Feel free to take a look/improve it!  talk 23:50, 23 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Does a companion essay exist advising to read a discussion before commenting? 

message: 1) I had seen reasons of couple of users that they write detail response because the want to be wish to be thorough or at times define keep the record straight. Can that position be acknowledged in the section "Reasons for length"?
2) Can we have a separate section to provide tips where we can shift present paragraph "..A further option for both readers and writers is to structure the writing so it can be skimmed effectively. This means writing.." and also add tips about collapse template, underlining sentences for quick reading in own comment, providing mid discussion synopsis. If one wants to dot down through response for record sake can write in own user space sub-page and a link in the discussion. 
 Bookku    (talk) 11:42, 27 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some suggestions