Wikipedia:Article size

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Limits on article size are set by a) technical issues, and b) is considerably more than the text itself. For example, a table line

Monaco 16000 2 31987 

may be coded as

<tr><td>[[Monaco]]</td><td align=right>16000</td>
 <td align=right>2</td><td align=right>31987</td></tr>

If a table gets too large and splitting up is not desirable one may choose to sacrifice formatting details like "align=right". Do not remove </td> or </tr> tags; MediaWiki will try to clean up after unclosed tags but doesn't guarantee that it'll do what you wanted. Thus it will be reduced to: table markup should be used:

 |-
  | [[Monaco]] || 16000 || 2 || 31987
  

Which browsers have problems with long articles?

Current mobile browsers and some older PC web browsers cannot correctly edit long pages because they crop the source text to 32 KB.

The issue has been found in versions of Netscape Navigator up to 4.76 (the latest version is 8 or greater) and Opera up to version 6.04 (the latest version is 8.5 or greater). No other PC browsers are known to be affected. More recent versions should not have this problem.

For notes on unrelated problems that various web browsers have with MediaWiki sites, and for a list of alternative browsers you can download, see Wikipedia:Browser notes.

If you have problems editing a long article

If you have encountered an article that is too long so you can't edit it, or if your browser will chop off the end of the article when you try to edit it, there are a few ways you can solve the problem.

If it's feasible to do so, the best permanent solution is to upgrade to a more modern web browser. No modern web browsers (as far as we know) have this problem, and there are many other benefits to upgrading. More recent versions will be considerably more secure, will do a better job displaying content written to more modern HTML (and other) standards, and will have fixed many bugs, including this one. Many articles on Wikipedia are going to be longer than 32k on a permanent basis, so you will continue to have occasional problems with article length as long as you are using an older browser.

As a temporary solution, you should be able to edit the article one section at a time by using the "Edit" links you see next to each header in the article. This should work as long as none of the sections are longer than 32k, which they really shouldn't be. You can edit text before the first section by editing the first section, then changing the &section= part of the URL to say &section=0. You can insert a new section either by using the "+" link (if there is one) in the "Views" section, or by editing an existing section and explicitly adding a second header line within it. See also Editing of individual sections.

If you find a section too long to edit safely, you can post a request for assistance on the Village Pump. Follow the "post" link for the assistance section, which will allow you to post a new comment without editing any existing text. Filling your request may take from an hour to a week, depending on the response of your fellow volunteer editors.

See also

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