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October 11

Longest Article on a Person

I used to enjoy going through printed encyclopedias and creating a list of people, living or dead, with the longest articles. A quick search on Google produced only one or two names. It would be great to see a list of 50 or 100 names in order by length of article. No one has done this yet? Indexguy (talk) 22:26, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

For Wikipedia? @Indexguy: Because articles aren't stable and we try to keep all articles under a certain size. Ian.thomson (talk) 22:42, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

See Special:LongPages for a list of 100 of the longest pages. As you can see there are articles on people there, and if the topic is huge, spin off articles are created, such as the current biggest: List of Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign endorsements and 5th Presidency of Donald Trump. Recentism is apparent as Obama does not have a page in the top 100, but H. Clinton, and G W Bush do. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:53, 11 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note that length isn't necessarily a virtue in the world of Wikipedia: "A page of about 10,000 words takes between 30 and 40 minutes to read at average speed, which is close to the attention span of most readers" according to WP:Article length. Alansplodge (talk) 08:44, 13 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]