Wikipedia:Summary style

This page documents an English Wikipedia editing guideline.

Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page.

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This page in a nutshell:

Sections of long articles should be spun off into their own articles leaving a summary in its place
Summary sections are linked to the detailed article with a {{main|<name of detailed article>}} or comparable template
To preserve links to the edit history of the moved text, the first edit summary of the new article links back to the original.

Article in summary style
World War II World War II was the most extensive and costly armed conflict in the history of the world ... 1 Causes Further information: Causes of World War II The war reparations demanded of Germany after World War I ... 2 Prelude to War Further information: Events preceding World War II in Europe Resentment of the victorious powers' treatment of the Weimar Republic in the aftermath of World War I... 3 European Theatre Further information: European Theatre of World War II The German Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1 ... 4 The Pacific War Further information: Pacific War The Japanese had already invaded China before World War II started in Europe ...

Wikipedia articles tend to grow in a way which lends itself to the natural creation of new articles. The text of any article consists of a sequence of related but distinct subtopics. When there is enough text in a given subtopic to merit its own article, that text can be summarized from the present article and a link provided to the more detailed article.

The length of a given Wikipedia article tends to grow as people add information to it. This cannot go on forever: very long articles would cause problems. So we must move information out of articles periodically. In general, information should not be removed from Wikipedia: that would defeat the purpose of the contributions. So we must create new articles to hold the excised information.

Size

Articles over a certain size may not cover their topic in a way that's readable and easy to navigate. Opinions vary as to what counts as an ideal length; judging the appropriate size depends on the topic and whether it easily lends itself to being split up.

Basic technique

Longer articles are split into sections, each about several good-sized paragraphs long. Subsectioning can increase this amount. Ideally many of those sections will eventually provide summaries of separate articles on the subtopic covered in that section (a Main article or similar link would be below the section title—see {{Main}}, {{Details}},...) Each article on a subtopic is an encyclopedic article in its own right and contains its own lead section (which will be quite similar to the summary in its 'parent' article).

Other specifics

Avoiding unnecessary splits

Shortcut

WP:AVOIDSPLIT

Editors are cautioned to not immediately split articles if the new article would meet neither the general notability criterion nor the specific notability criteria for their topic. Instead, editors are encouraged to work on further developing the main article first, locating sources of real-world coverage that apply both to the main topic and the subtopic. Through this process, it may become evident that subtopics or groups of subtopics can demonstrate their own notability and help justifying splitting off into their own article. If information can be trimmed, merged, or removed, these steps should be undertaken first before the new article is created.

Always mention in the edit summary when splitting

Whenever you break up a page, please note the split (including the page names between double square brackets) in the edit summary. Add {{Main}} to the top of the section that is being split out, to indicate where the main article for that section is.

Avoidance of POV forks

See also Wikipedia:Content forking

In applying summary style to articles, care must be taken to avoid a POV fork (that is, a split which results in the original article and/or the spin-off violating NPOV), and/or a difference in approach between the summary and the spin-off, etc. See: Wikipedia:Content forking, Article spinouts - "Summary style" articles.

Where an article is long, and has lots of subtopics with their own articles, try to balance parts of the main page. Do not put overdue weight into one part of an article at the cost of other parts. In shorter articles, if one subtopic has much more text than another subtopic, that may be an indication that that subtopic should have its own page, with only a summary presented on the main page.

Keeping summary articles and detailed articles synchronised

Sometimes editors will add details to a summary section without adding those facts to the more detailed article. To keep articles synchronized, editors should first add any new material to the appropriate places in the detailed article, and if appropriate, summarize the material in the summary section. In other cases, the detailed article may grow considerably in scope, and the summary section will need to be re-written to do it justice. These problems may be tagged with {{Sync}}.

Naming conventions for subarticles

Subarticles (not to be confused with subpages) of a "Summary style" article are one of a few instances where an exception to the common names principle for article naming is sometimes acceptable, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Subsidiary articles.

Subarticle navigation

Unless all subarticles of a "Summary style" article are truly compliant to the common names principle, it is a good idea to provide a navigational template to connect the subarticles among themselves, and with the "Summary style" main article.

Example of such navigational template, used on subarticles of the "Isaac Newton" article: {{IsaacNewtonSegments}}

References, citations and external links

"Summary style" is an excellent technique to give more structure to long lists of references: for example the "World War II" summary style article portrayed above could have a "Further reading" section which treats the history of World War II as a whole, while the subarticles are provided with references which treat the specifics of each of these subtopics, e.g. books on World War II in the Pacific region are used as references in the Pacific War article. Similarly, External links relevant to the subtopic should go in the subtopic article and external links which treat the history of World War II as a whole belong in the summary style article.

There is no need to repeat all the references for the subtopics in the main "Summary style" article, unless they are required to support a specific point. The policy on sources, Wikipedia:Verifiability, says that sources must be provided for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, and for all quotations.

When adding material to a section in the summary style, however, it is important to ensure that the material is present in the sub-article with a reference. This also imposes additional burden in maintaining Wikipedia articles, as it is important to ensure that the broad article and its sub-articles remain consistent.

Lead section

For the planned paper Wikipedia 1.0, one recommendation is that the paper version of articles will be the lead section of the web version. Summary style and news style can help make a concise intro that works stand-alone. And The Emancipation Proclimation!!

Rationale

This style of organizing articles is somewhat related to news style except it focuses on topics instead of articles. The idea is to summarize and distribute information across related articles in a way that can serve readers who want varying amounts of detail. Thus giving readers the ability to zoom to the level of detail they need and not exhausting those who need a primer on a whole topic.

This is more helpful to the reader than a very long article that just keeps growing, eventually reaching book-length. Summary style is accomplished by not overwhelming the reader with too much text up front by summarizing main points and going into more detail on particular points (sub-topics) in separate articles. What constitutes 'too long' is largely based on the topic, but generally 30KB of prose is the starting point where articles may be considered too long. Articles that go above this have a burden of proof that extra text is needed to efficiently cover its topic and that the extra reading time is justified.

Sections that are less important for understanding the topic will tend to be lower in the article (this is news style applied to sections). Often this is difficult to do for articles on history or that are otherwise chronologically based unless there is some type of analysis section. Organizing in this way is important due to the fact that many readers will not finish reading the article.

Levels of desired details

Shortcut

WP:DETAIL

Wikipedia is not divided into a macropædia, micropædia, and concise versions as is the Encyclopædia Britannica — we must serve all three user types in the same encyclopedia. Summary style is based on the premise that information about a topic should not all be contained in a single article since different readers have different needs;

many readers need just a quick summary of the topic's most important points (lead section),
others need a moderate amount of info on the topic's more important points (a set of multi-paragraph sections), and
some readers need a lot of detail on one or more aspects of the topic (links to full-sized separate articles).

The parent article should have general summary information and the more detailed summaries of each subtopic should be in daughter articles and in articles on specific subjects. This can be thought of as layering inverted pyramids where the reader is shown the tip of a pyramid (the lead section) for a topic and within that article any section may have a {{main|<subpage name>}} or similar link to a full article on the topic summarized in that section (see Yosemite National Park#History and History of the Yosemite area for an example using two featured articles). The summary in a section at the parent article will often be at least twice as long as the lead section in the daughter article. The daughter article in turn can also serve as a parent article for its specific part of the topic. And so on until a topic is very thoroughly covered. Thus by navigational choices several different types of readers get the amount of detail they want.

Size

Basic technique

Other specifics

Avoiding unnecessary splits

Always mention in the edit summary when splitting

Avoidance of POV forks

Keeping summary articles and detailed articles synchronised

Naming conventions for subarticles

Subarticle navigation

References, citations and external links

Lead section

Rationale

Levels of desired details

See also

Templates