Wikipedia:WikiProject Extra-Long Article Committee/Reverts

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This is a page to discuss and formulate general guidelines on ELAC tag reverts, protocols. All revert suggestions, from both anonimous contributors, registered Wikipedians, and from ELAC participants, are welcome:

[edit] Overview

When an article gets reported to the ELAC, a first step, if the ELAC votes or decides to engage, will be to place an ELAC tag on the main page of the article:

Once this tag is in place, there will then exist or develop an urge or tendency for confident editors, for whatever reason, to feel compelled to remove these maintenance tags. Certainly, these types of revert actions will be justified by the well-intentioned editor. For the sake of the readers and Wikipedia in general, however, these actions will be considered as a form of unintentional vandalism and will be dealt with in a progressive manner.

If one registered Wikipedian reports a page to the ELAC as “long” there may very well be 100s if not 1000s of skimming or light readers who may feel the same way. Any article that is over 32kb and has been reported to the ELAC as being too long may justifiably fall into this category. The 32kb guide line is a well-known and standard limition.^[1] Studies show, for example, that 50% of the pages on the Web are 32 Kb or less.^[2][3][4] In addition, according to the expert editors of the article "Web design", noting that screen resolution and internet speed averages around 1024x768 and 768 kpbs, respectively, and since the ideal loading time of a webpage is 0.3 seconds or less at a connection of 768 kbps (DSL/Cable), this would mean that an ideal article size is 32 KB or less.

Technically, because of the market share of modern browers (depending on your target market), the compatability of your website with the viewers is restricted. For instance, a website that is designed for the majority of websurfers will be limited to the use of valid XHTML 1.0 Strict or older, Cascading Style Sheets Level 1, 1024x768 display resolution, and a size of around 32 KB. This is because Internet Explorer is not fully W3C standards compliant with the modularity of XHTML 1.1 and the majority of CSS beyond 1.

It needs to be remembered that someone on the other end of the Internet is going to download and read Wikipedia articles. Because of this, it is desirable to have them load as quickly as possible. In this direction, a good rule of thumb for keeping the download time short is:^[5][6]

(A) Limit webpages to a 30-32kb maximum size, including all images, references, links, and coding.

(B) Use multiple pages instead of one long page.

The ELAC tag, subsequently, is put in place so to investigate the reported over-the-limit article. It is strongly recommended that only other ELAC team members remove these tags. Article tagging does not mean that the page will be divided up by the ELAC team but only that we are investigating the situation. Regular editors of that page are encouraged to discuss the case with the ELAC team and with the community in general. The ELAC team is very open and quite flexible in this regard and will be happy to leave the article if just cause to do so is established. The ELAC has no issues with any article in particular. Our focus and interest is for the betterment of Wikipedia, in general.

[edit] Requests for ELAC tag removal

If you feel your page has been tagged unfairly, please leave your tag removal requests below. The ELAC team, generally, does not want to be involved with tensioned pages or pages that don't necessarily need division, and will gladly remove these tags if just cause is shown:

1. Article: , Reason: , Comments:
2. Article: , Reason: , Comments:
3. Article: , Reason: , Comments:

[edit] ELAC tag revert procedures

If a page editor removes an ELAC tag, the following steps should be taken:

1. Contact the user, on their talk page, and ask: “please don’t do that”.
2. Contact other ELAC members to have them contact the user to ask: “please don’t do that”.
3. Contact administrators associated with the ELAC project to have them contact the user to ask: “please don’t do that”.
4. Report the user to the Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents.
5. Report the situation to the ELAC talk page.

[edit] Tagging notes for ELAC team members

To avoid potential ELAC tag reverts, please put the following in the Edit summary section:

[edit] Comment

The first step, obviously, towards the successful reduction of a page, is for an ELAC member to place an ELAC tag at the top of the main page of a long article. Now, after this tag is placed, I have found that there will be a tendency for the regulars of that page to remove the tag, e.g. here is a tag revert (Evolution), for so and so reason. This is an issue that I feel very strongly about. If we, as a group, can enforce the tag, then I feel strongly that many articles will reduce on their own with little committee involvement. Thus, if there is general community and committee consensus that a page is long, I plan to enforce the tag. That is, I plan to be very aggressive with users who revert tags, e.g. I will seek admin help, seek ELAC member help, user blocks, talk page aggressiveness, etc. Now, on the other had, if a page becomes too argumentative, I would suggest a retreat, wherein which we list that "difficult page" on the ELAC:difficult pages (which I will start later).

Essentially, a main goal of the ELAC should be to develop easy-to-use page reduction techniques that function to encourage division without a great amount of argument. I feel strongly that the simple effect of group tag enforcement will be a strong driving force for article division in Wikipedia. --Sadi Carnot 18:22, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] ELAC tag reverts (protocols)

Hi Gurch, you seem to be fairly knowledgeable about behind the scenes Wiki-Media, Wiki-stuff, and Wiki-details, etc., why don't you join our group? Your help would be appreciated. --Sadi Carnot 19:30, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi. I recognize this issue is an important one, and I appreciate the effort you're putting in. I'm don't really want to concern myself with article content or policy making, though; I tend to stick to administrative and maintenance tasks (vandalism patrol, speedy deletions, archive tagging, that sort of thing). Thanks for asking, though, and let me know if you need anything – Gurch 02:31, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I understand. Feel free to check in on us from time-to-time, your inputs are good. I may come to you with questions here or there, if that's ok. One question, for example, is what is the best way to find a couple of admins who would help in backing up (ELAC) long-article tag reverts? This is a situation I've been in before. I'm interested in trying to streamline the process. In other words, if an ELAC team member says “please don’t do that” but they repeat the action, it may then (depending on the situation) be helpful to have an admin say “please don’t do that”. Some long articles are so tensioned up that, in many cases, the regulars can’t stand to see an extra-long article tag on their page. This could potentially lead to a heated situation, which is what I don’t want. Thus, say we tag an article (on the main page) that has been reported to us, but then the tag gets removed by an article regular per some random justification. What protocols would you suggest to handle a situation like this? --Sadi Carnot 14:04, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

If users persistently remove maintenance tags without explanation, despite being warned several times, this is usually considered vandalism; note this at Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism and an administrator should take appropriate action fairly quickly. If users appear to be edit warring over whether or not the article should have a tag, try leaving a message at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents – Gurch 14:13, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, this sounds like a good plan. Talk later: --Sadi Carnot 14:17, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

In this case, removal is not vandalism, since there is no community consensus that this tag should even exist. A handful of editors do not consensus make. -- BrianSmithson 01:30, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] See also

• Wikipedia:Etiquette
• Wikipedia:Ownership of articles
• Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars
• Wikipedia:Dispute resolution
• Wikipedia:Three-revert rule
• Wikipedia:Edit war

[edit] References

1. ^ Kyrnin, Jennier (2005). Speeding up you webpage, About.com
2. ^ From the Seventh Georgia Tech GVU WWW survey, as found in “How much is too much?”
3. ^ More than 1/2 of Americans still using dial-up (Nov 22, 2006)
4. ^ Only 25-28% of Americans use broadband (Nov 20, 2006)
5. ^ Speedy Web Pages – Web Design at About.com
6. ^ Yale Style Manual: Page Length