I'm a few steps to move the article "Day-night cycle" back to the page "Day", but I'm not sure about this, as we have already moved this page a lot, I'm trying to understand what is happening and if there is a problem with these "moves", and what exactly this possible problem would be. So I bring here this history compilation:
Musical chairs[]
| Date | User | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2015-10-29 | Lefiath | Created page Day. |
| 2017-03-30 | JavaRogers | Moved page Day to Passing of Time. |
| 2017-04-19 | JavaRogers | Redirected page Passing of Time to Daycycle and Seasons. |
| 2018-05-03 | Sapador | Redirected page Passing of Time to Seasons. |
| 2019-11-15 | Sapador | Moved page Passing of Time back to its original title Day without leaving a redirect. |
| 2019-11-15 | Sapador | Redirected page Day to Day-night cycle#Day. |
These are all the move and redirect logs we have on History: Day.
Well, the original title was Day for a reason. What was that? My guess is that the word "day" is required in a lot of other articles to explain the routine of subjects and the Greed. When exactly archers retreat back from hunting to defend the outerwall, and when a builder starts repairing that wall, for example. So the words "day" and "night" will probably receive a lot of links to them.
But, if the word "day" has such importance, why has the page been moved and redirected so many times? My second guess is that the page hadn't enough content, and according to our 1st rule on articles notability:
Good guidelines[]
“ Articles must contain enough information to warrant a full page. If they do not have enough content, they should be merged with other similar articles.—Kingdom Wiki:Style guide § Notability „
And that has been done towards the pages:
- Passing of Time
- Daycycle and Seasons
- Day-night cycle
These are all titles trying to describe the general idea of time in the Kingdom games. Even the Seasons got mixed with, in an effort to "warrant a full page". This is fair, considering how few information the original pages had when created (example).
This rule has its importance for sure, but I'd like to add a counterpoint to that. We should consider how links point to that page. If none of the links point to the title itself, and all of them target the sections of the page, is that title a good one? When deciding on an article title, Wikipedia says:
“ Naturalness – The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles.—Kingdom Wiki:Entity names § Naming process „
If I understand this correctly, it says that if editors would never use the expression "Daycycle and Seasons" in the prose paragraphs of articles, this is probably a bad title. This recommendation of "naturalness" is even mentioned on the 3rd rule of our styleguide about naming in-game entities.
Based on that naturalness of titles and links, I've split some pages, like the page Mounts, that contained the full description of 9 different mounts along with the nuances between the games. Currently we have 13 different mounts in the Kingdom series. This is a lot of content to only one page.
Long pages problem[]
Long pages like that creates some problems in my opinion:
They discourage users willing to add content. When users see a page with the title "Passing of time" and with a section about the "Day", they're more likely to think that what is in the section "Day" is enough content. That even if they have details that could be added to that section, they end up with an impression that such addition wouldn't be this necessary, as the page is about "Passing of time" in general, and not specifically about "Day".
Even if users can click on the "Edit section" button, long pages just tend to discourage further editions. I've seen this on the pages Hermits (already split), Statues, and others. Those are pages that receive an absurd amount of visitors (according to Fandom monthly reports), but they get proportionally much less editions if compared to shorter pages receiving much less traffic (I've not calculated these numbers; this is just a general impression). And it's not that long pages are perfect, they're not. They do have a lot of imprecisions, lack of details per section, rewording needs, etc.
Also long pages about many in-game entities have a comment section that may become uninteresting for a lot of users. Of course there will always be a few fanatics who appreciate reading a comment section with 125 comments about Warhorse, Stag, Bear, etc. when they were firstly searching for the Unicorn. But in general, regular users looking for Unicorn would like to read comments about the Unicorn. Now, the users looking for all comments about all mounts would certainly lose with the split, as they'd have to visit many pages to acces these comments. At the end I'm more likely considering this an acceptable down point. Some expert guy could create a script or DPL to gather those comments on one page, maybe? I don't know. This is not something I'm worried about.
TL;DR So even if we end up with a few short pages, I think the benefits of having editors willing to improve these short articles along with natural links, and neater comment sections, the befefits are greater, and the change, well worth.
Note: this last section was not written with an express intention of being a wall of text and somewhat illustrate the wickedness of long articles. This is a coincidence.