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User talk:Thinker78/Draft MOS:LEADLENGTH table modification

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Too much for MoS

[edit]

This is way, way too much material to shoe-horn into MOS:LEADLENGTH.

I would suggest aiming for this to be a WP:Manual of Style/Lead section length subpage, tagged with {{Supplement}}. The material is good, but the MoS guidelines are already over-long [kind of ironic in this context].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:13, 27 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

SMcCandlish Thanks for your feedback! I will try to do what you advised me. This draft as its lead indicates is not intended to be all included in the guideline, but it is brainstorming for a new table, one version of which I developed and is the Option 1 table. It is basically what would be in the guideline instead of the current table there. If you can tell me your thoughts of the Option 1 table, it would be appreciated as well. Thanks again! Thinker78 (talk) 23:22, 27 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, I see. I misunderstood the nature of all this material then. Looking at just that table: I don't understand whether the "From" and "To" columns are meant to represents words or characters. If the latter, that is probably too radical a change from the existing table. If the former, why did you change from our current characters metric to a words one? That just confuses the comparison and makes the proposal harder to evaluate.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:49, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@SMcCandlish I clarified the table after your feedback. The measurement you were having doubts about is in words. I changed it because it is easier measuring words than characters, following consensus in the relevant discussion, a summary of which you can find in the draft under the heading Thread consensus analysis for table modification. Thinker78 (talk) 16:38, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
What average-characters-per-word rubric are you using here? We still need to be able to convert this to characters, to meaningfully compare the extant table with the draft replacement, so see how much of a change it is.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:01, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@SMcCandlish About 6 to 1, per estimate of data using the Prosesize tool. Thinker78 (talk) 22:10, 28 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, then the original table with a word-count column added would look like this:

Article characters Article words Lead length
Fewer than 15,000 characters Fewer than 2,500 words One or two paragraphs
15,000–30,000 characters 2,500–5,000 words Two or three paragraphs
More than 30,000 characters More than 5,000 words Three or four paragraphs

And the Option 1 table with a char-count column added (for the sake of comparison here, not for necessarily final use – we should arguably use one metric or the other) would look like this:

Article size in words Max. chars. Statistical Size Proportional size Lead % Lead words min Lead words max Lead paragraphs min Lead paragraphs max
From To[a]
0 1,500 9,000 Average Very small 15 5 225 1 1/350=4
1,500 4,000 24,000 C Small 9 225 360 1/1k=2 4
4,000 6,500 39,000 GA Medium 8 360 520 1/1k=4 7
6,500 10,000 60,000 FAH, B Large 7 520 700 1/1.3k=5 8
10,000 + >60,000 Topper Very large 5 700 850 1/1.5k=6 12

Notes

  1. ^ Calculated according to the average of the corresponding type of article, doubling it to set the limit.

Comparing like-with-like will help put the proposed changes into better perspective.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:00, 29 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the advice! I added the character column for perspective. What do you think of the new table overall? Thinker78 (talk) 01:32, 29 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Still pondering it. This is a lot of material to cover. As for just table layout, I'm not certain all these columns of data are really necessary in the final version. Using the division slash in place of the word "per" is confusing here. Also, I'm not sure what "FAH" is supposed to mean; it's not an abbreviation I see used around here. One thing that's bugged me since I first looked at the table is that three columns are redundant – "our editors are not stupid". :-) Also, the math is unnecessarily complex for this purpose. Try:
Article max. size in words[a] Max. chars. Statistical Size Proportional size Lead % Lead words max. Lead paragraphs[b]
1,500 10,000 Average Very small 15 225 1–4
4,000 25,000 C Small 9 360 2–4
6,500 40,000 GA Medium 8 520 4–7
10,000 60,000 FA, B[c] Large 7 700 5–8
>10,000 >60,000 Topper Very large 5 850 7–12

Notes

  1. ^ Calculated according to the average of the corresponding type of article, doubling it to set the limit.
  2. ^ Aim to be within about a paragraph of: 1 lead paragraph per 1200 article words, or per 500 words in very small articles.
  3. ^ B-class articles tend to be large because of poorer writing and over-inclusion of unencyclopedic trivia, while FA-class articles tend to grow from GA-class ones as they become more complete in their coverage of the subject.
I also rounded the "Max. chars." numbers just a little. Added an explanatory footnote about B and FA.

If this is too much of a change from what you have in mind, we can consider this an "Option 2" alternative table.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:39, 29 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@SMcCandlish Thanks for your suggestions! I applied them to the table. FAH is a random acronym I chose to differentiate random Feature articles from Feature articles of health. I first used the health ones to calculate their numbers per information collected by another editor, but then I realized all of them were about health. Therefore, I decided to look for more random articles because I know health articles can be larger than average ones. Regarding complex math, you could be up for a surprise, because I was thinking in using actual statistical formulas to make statistical calculations. :O :D Thinker78 (talk) 19:43, 30 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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