Wikipedia:Too much detail
This is an explanatory essay about the procedural policy regarding policies and guidelines. This page provides additional information about concepts in the page(s) it supplements. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. |
This page in a nutshell: Be careful not to bloat articles with excessive detail |
When seeing a section or subsection within an article, editors often try to expand them, especially if such sections or subsections are short. However, there are times when people add one or more of the following to such articles:
- Excessive detail
- Irrelevant content that is better placed in a different article
- Trivial content
Before inserting the new material, one should consider the significance of his/her additions. Is it something the topic is widely known for? What is its connection to the topic's notability? Any indiscriminate detail should be removed. Readers might lose interest when a portion of an article goes into too much detail on one specific aspect. Other times, readers might question how so much detail on something is important to the topic. Wikipedia is not supposed to be a collection of every single fact about a subject.
When an article or section has too much content and becomes bloated, it is common for other editors to place the {{Overly detailed}} or {{Very long}} tags within an article. In such instance, delete details that can be reasonably removed.