Help:Page size

{{h:h|editor toc}}
There are questions and controversy on how large a page should be due to the problems with editing pages over a (what is now) relatively small size.  Older browsers can have problems editing pages that exceed 32K.  Now, an article needs to be as long as necessary to properly carry the content, but where it becomes necessary to shrink an article there are options that may be used.

* Use transclusion.  The use of template macros, which are referenced via '''<nowiki>{{</nowiki>macro_name}}''' or '''<nowiki>{{</nowiki>macro_name|parameters}}''' (where the ''parameters'' are dependent on what the macro does) can be used to include boilerplate text or text altered by the parameters in an article without having to include the coding to create that text directly in the article.  It can also be used to have a series of articles have the same header or footer and make them consistent.
* Use subsidiary articles.  When there is material which is tangential to the article, or related to the article's subject matter, but are in-depth coverage of a subsidiary subject related to the article, it may be appropriate to move that material to a secondary article.  For example, in the article on [[w:chess]], the subject of the rules is in a separate article with the heading ''Main article: [[w:Rules of chess]]''.
* Place items that are related to the article and can be separated in a section called '''See Also'''.

==Finding the size of the wikitext of a page==
There is a parser function PAGESIZE. 

Examples:
*{{xpd0|PAGESIZE:Help:Template}}
*{{xpd1|PAGESIZE:Help:Template|R}}

In older versions of MediaWiki finding the size of the wikitext of a page can only be done indirectly:

*search; use suitable search terms to get few other results; e.g. for [[Help:Variable]] one can use the search terms:

::de Wikipedia Variablen zh Help 变量

:which conveniently gives no other results, and shows that the size is, at the time of this writing, "0.8KB (142 words)".

*for a page in the main namespace, also [[Special:Shortpages]] and [[Special:Longpages]] can be used.

*the text can also be copied in a local editor and saved; note that small deviations can be due to newline taking one or two bytes.

==Image size==
The size of an image or other uploaded file is shown in
*the entry of the [[Help:Page_history#Image_history|image history]]
*[[Special:Imagelist]]
*[[Special:Newimages]]
*on the category pages of the categories that contain the image.

==See also==
*[[Help:Section#Sections_vs._separate_pages_vs._transclusion|Sections vs. separate pages vs. transclusion]] - advantages and disadvantages of large pages.

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