Talk:Acorn Archimedes

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Much too long

This article is too long.

In August 2022 a bot put a notice to that effect at the top of the article. Then there were 22,622 words. Now (25 January 2024) the article has 24,488 words.

Wikipedia:Article size § Size guideline recommends that when the number of words is >8,000 thought should be given to the size. An article with >15,000 words "Almost certainly should be divided or trimmed".

Alongside this is giving consideration to what is actually making the article so long. Wikipedia:Too much detail informs us that "Wikipedia is not supposed to be a collection of every single fact about a subject".

One contender is taking the A3000 section together with the A3010, A3020, A4000 section into a new article as because they were similar and for the same market.

The section RISC OS only needs to be 2 or 3 paragraphs to briefly summarise as there are already articles RISC OS and List of RISC OS bundled applications. In its present form it has much duplication.

It is hard to make an article shorter. I have various models in this product range so I am interested. But "Articles over a certain size may not cover their topic in a way that is easy to find or read" in Wikipedia:Summary style § Article size is relevant here. BlueWren0123 (talk) 23:50, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

It was actually @Millstream3 who added the maintenance tag in this edit. As I noted in the exchange with you on my talk page, one of the challenges is to unbundle sections of this page into other articles, but I do not want to get into a notability dispute with people about whether they think the A3000 series is worth another article, only to see it get deleted. Moreover, separate articles seem to suffer from duplication and maintenance problems, such as the Risc PC article which has non-subjective quality issues.

One thing I particularly want to emphasise is that a lot of the information I have added relies on its context. The RISC OS section is meant to communicate the software situation from the point in time that RISC OS, as opposed to Arthur, was first delivered for the Archimedes. Moving that content to the History of RISC OS article, whilst avoiding the wrath of the clique who continue to insist that RISC OS is some kind of modern contender, risks losing that context and thus putting the content at risk of degradation by being deemed off-topic in its new context.

I wouldn't mind, but the History of RISC OS article exhibits some of the same copy-pasting from the inaccurate history previously found on the Acorn Computers article, along with copious trivia: Element 14 being named after silicon - no, really?! I don't want to have to follow my contributions around Wikipedia and be saddled with fixing up yet more articles that people scrawled their recollections into fifteen or so years ago.

By the way, I am not listing "every fact" about this topic. But I am trying to give the treatment of the topic sufficient depth so that people do not keep trotting out myths and misunderstandings about what they thought happened thirty or so years ago. To take an example that I noted in my talk page discussion, people have had wild ideas about the performance of the Archimedes and had seemingly endless arguments about what "MIPS" means, all of which was put to bed by just reading a couple of sources and digesting what Acorn had claimed, which had nothing to do with what a lot of those arguing believed it did. I don't doubt that the discussion on performance can be condensed, but, sure, we could certainly trim all of that away and let people start arguing again in all their ignorance.

I don't know, really. People seem to want short and simple narratives these days, typified by the one continually doing the rounds about how Steve and Sophie designed the ARM (which random YouTube commenters take to mean that they "invented RISC") and then the eventual glory and market success was simply inevitable (it's in everybody's phone, those commenters have to point out), when a combination of luck and outside expertise actually intervened to stop the whole thing from slowly fading away or at least being substantially less successful. When the actual story is more interesting, why wouldn't anyone want to hear that instead? Sometimes, I really do wonder whether people want to learn about these topics or whether they just want their existing perspectives reinforced. I don't contribute to Wikipedia in order to facilitate the latter.

Having written of all this, it might be constructive to consider other articles that supposedly demonstrate a better division of content. I noted that there are articles describing other computing systems that could indicate a formula to adopt here. However, finding a good one is difficult: Atari ST does not have enough content, Macintosh-related articles have been sliced and diced to absurd levels, the Apple II article links out to all the different models but fails to cover the software platform in any detail; maybe the Commodore Amiga and Commodore 64 articles show a reasonable approach. PaulBoddie (talk) 17:29, 2 February 2024 (UTC)