Part of the Style and How-to Series
In order to make Wikipedia maximally useful to the largest number of people some people believe that articles should be written in summary style. This style of organizing articles is somewhat related to news style except it focuses on topics instead of articles. The idea is to distribute information in such a way so that Wikipedia can serve readers who want varying amounts of detail; it is up to the reader to choose how much detail they are exposed to. This is done by not overwhelming the reader with too much text at once by using progressively longer and longer summaries.
World War IIWorld War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world ... 1 CausesMain article: Causes of World War II The war reparations demanded of Germany after World War I ... 2 Prelude to WarMain article: Events preceding World War II in Europe Resentment of the victorious powers' treatment of the Weimar Republic in the aftermath of World War I... 3 European TheatreMain article: European Theatre of World War II The German Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1 ... 4 The Pacific WarMain article: Pacific War The Japanese had already invaded China before World War II started in Europe ... |
Some characteristics:
- Articles written in summary style have lead sections,
- Longer articles are split into sections (each about several good-sized paragraphs long; subsectioning can increase this amount)
- Ideally many of those sections will eventually summarize entire separate articles on the sub-topic covered in that section (a Main article or similar link would be below the section title). And so on.
- As a rule, they do not trigger a page size warning (in rare cases this rule must be broken since the point is to limit readable text, not markup and sometimes markup may push a page above 30 KB).
Rationale
Since Wikipedia is not divided into a macropaedia and a micropaedia like Encyclopaedia Britannica is, we must serve both user types in the same encyclopedia. Summary style is based on the premise that information about a topic should not all be contained in a single article since different readers have different needs;
- some readers need just a quick summary (lead section),
- more people need a moderate amount of info (a set of multi-paragraph sections),
- and yet others need a lot of detail (links to full-sized separate articles).
We must serve all groups.
The top or survey article should have general summary information and the more detailed summaries of each subtopic should be in daughter articles and in articles on specific subjects. This can be thought of as layering inverted pyramids where the reader is shown the tip of a pyramid (the lead section) for a topic and within that article any section may have a Main article or More detail link to a full article on the topic summarized in that section (see Grand Canyon#Geology and Geology of the Grand Canyon area for an example). The summary at the survey article will necessarily be at least (if not more than) twice as long as the lead section in the daughter article. The daughter article in turn can also serve as a survey article for its specific part of the topic. And so on until a topic is very thoroughly covered. Thus by navigational choices several different types of readers get the amount of detail they want.
Size
Articles longer than ~15 printed pages (more than 30KB of readable text) take a rather long time to read for what is supposed to be a general encyclopedia. When articles grow past this amount of readable text, they should be broken-up to improve readability and ease of editing. See Wikipedia:Page size. Longer sections should be spun off into their own articles and a several paragraph summary should be left in its place. That way our content is useful to those people who just want a quick overview and to those people who want more detail. Both groups win. Also, long articles are less editable and less readable than a more compact treatment.
There are also technical issues with editing articles over 30KB that often lead to duplicated information and poor structure. Few editors will read an entire 50 or 70KB article just to make sure a piece of info they want to put in is not already there. The result is that the information is misplaced, duplicated, or not put in at all.
Lead section
For the planned paper Wikipedia 1.0, one consensus recommendation is that the paper version of articles will be the lead section of the web version. Summary style and news style can help make a concise intro that works stand-alone.