Talk:Advanced Robotics Book

split into smaller pages
I notice it has been suggested that this topic be broken up into smaller parts. I'd argue strenuously against that.

Firstly, this is not really a long page anyway.

Secondly, the idea that it would enhance focus is suspect. I've heard it repeated many times since way back in the 80s, but have never heard anybody back it up with actual evidence. In fact everything I've seen would indicate the reverse is true. As far as I can work out it has come from a condescending view of the public as being stupid and having the attention-span of gnats. This is wrong, and is especially untrue of those wanting to learn from wikibooks.

I know that I, personally, find it quite difficult to read and refer back to a book if it has been divided into numerous parts. The first thing I do when I get a wikibook in pieces is to arduously paste them all together into a single, long page locally on my machine, then fix all the links so that I can easily jump around inside the page.

Thirdly, each page that must be downloaded has overheads. This doesn't matter so much for people living in big cities with fast broadband, but for the majority of us on the planet who still have slow internet access, waiting over and over again for all the extra information in each page makes the download take ages. A single, long page can as much as 10 times smaller than multiple pages, and all the request, wait, download dance that networks do means that it can take vastly longer than the simple size difference would indicate.

Please don't break this up into parts, and please reconsider the policy of doing that for other books. At least give readers a choice of whether they want them in multiple parts or a single long file. (If you do that I think you'll find most will prefer the latter.)

Miriam e (discuss • contribs) 04:40, 12 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I agree -- it takes far less time to read a book if I can get it all at once than if I have to keep clicking "next page" and waiting for the next page to load.
 * At least give readers a choice -- You may be interested in learning that many Wikibooks *do* give readers a choice. Many Wikibooks have a "print version" that contains all the content of the book as one single long page. The category: books with print version has an automatically-generated list of all Wikibooks with a "print version".
 * Sometimes it's easier to edit just one chapter of a book -- especially here on Wikibooks, where often someone *else* is editing some other chapter of the same book.
 * The "print version" semi-automatically does what you've been doing manually -- it grabs the latest version of each chapter of the Wikibook, splices them together into a single long page, and creates a table of contents with links to each section. I can quickly jump from the "Contents" to any section of the book. Help:Print versions has more details.
 * In particular, have you seen the Robotics Wikibook and its all-on-one-page Robotics/Print version?
 * --DavidCary (discuss • contribs) 03:04, 30 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you David. I didn't realise that. I don't own a printer, so probably saw the print link and ignored it (even though I now notice it has "export" in the link too). That is really nice to know. I very much appreciate the pointer.
 * I wonder if there are any statistics on how often edits clash. That might give an objective measure of when best to split pages up. If such an effect doesn't have much effect on pages less than a certain size then it would be good to leave them intact to facilitate the readers' experience.
 * Miriam e (discuss • contribs) 10:49, 30 June 2013 (UTC)