Talk:List of films based on actual events

Splitting Lists?

The idea came up at Talk:List of 2000s films based on actual events that we should split that article because it's currently over 700kB of wikitext, making it the top entry at Special:LongPages. Some of the other pages linked from here are also very long (if I'm remembering correctly, guidelines suggest starting to think about splitting articles at 75 or 100kB, although that's not a hard line, especially for lists). Currently these are at:

• before 1940: 218.4kB
• 1940s: 126.2kB
• 1950s: 167.1kB
• 1960s: 120.9kB
• 1970s: 223.3kB
• 1980s: 304.7kB
• 1990s: 418.1kB
• 2000s: 709.4kB
• 2010s: 246.2kB
• 2020s: 246.7kB (so far)

Note that those are the side of wikitext, not prose - it looks like the 2000s article is somewhere in the ballpark of 37.5k words and 200-250kB of actual text.

So I suppose my questions are:

1. Should we split the 2000s article?
2. If so, should we split other articles, as well?
3. Or do we decide that this is acceptable for ease of searching (despite the challenges long articles may bring for some users)?
4. If so, to what granularity do we break it up? Split it in half? Chop it into a piece for each year? (Personally: splitting it in half seems like too little, and in 10 pieces like too much. At the same time, "list of 2000-2005 films..." seems more awkward than either "list of 200s films..." or "list of 2001 films...")
5. Should we break out the 1930s into their own article? They appear to be about half of the pre-1940 article.
6. Are there other things that should be considered, such as non-noteworthy entries that should be deleted?

I'm willing to help with this as I have time, but I'd like to collect thoughts before doing anything. Thanks! LittlePuppers (talk) 03:31, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

@Gusfriend, MagicalSwift, Bennyzamir, Vanryoko, Onetwothreeip, Eyesnore, and Aquatic Ambiance: pinging users with some previous involvment in these articles (including some previous splits). LittlePuppers (talk) 03:46, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Hello, chiming in from the 2000s talk page.

For the searchability question, would be curious if a template like Template:Search box could be adapted for pseudo-databases like these (long shot). There's actually many large collections of information that are both valid ideas for Wikipedia articles but inherently too large to be an article-sized object. Should be something really fancy made, but a special search bar is probably asking a lot already from volunteers.

For splitting by year or five years, I think every 1 year would be the most intuitive to navigate. There's an article for 2003 in film, List of animated feature films of 2003, List of LGBT-related films of 2003... plenty of precedent. Can't find any two or five-year spanning articles.

About splitting the others, it's not as urgent. Let's see how splitting the 2000s one goes. And I disfavor deleting things, except in really bad cases. So far as I know there's no central database that says whether something is based on real events or not, so it's not like deleting a really boring column from a preexisting database that could be easily recovered. Those made-for-TV Australian films will be lost to the wind if we shrug them off. Wizmut (talk) 04:21, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Huh, I wonder why searching in lists of lists doesn't seem to be a thing. I looked into it a bit and it appears that it is doable with something along the lines of <div class="noprint"><div style="clear:right; float:right">{{Search box|root=List of Latin phrases|noslash=yes|search-button-label=Search lists of Latin phrases}}</div></div>, but that's been done in a grand total of 5 articles: 2 by Eddie891, 2 by Michael Bednarek, and 1 by a page copied from one of those. That seems like something that would be useful in a lot more articles, I wonder if it's worth making a template to be able to do that more cleanly (so you could do something like (to adapt the above example) {{search lists|root=List of Latin phrases|label=Search lists of Latin phrases}} and not have to deal with html and the other stuff.

Looking at it now though, that searches with a fixed prefix, so I'd have to do some research to figure out how to make it work with "list of [date] films based on actual events" where the part that changes isn't at the end. I'm kind of interested in that now, though. LittlePuppers (talk) 04:48, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

@Wizmut: Theoretically the box to the right should search all these pages. I'm still testing it out, and will probably take it to VPT for some feedback (and to see if I'm doing anything horribly wrong), but feel free to play around with it and give feedback. LittlePuppers (talk) 08:04, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

Looks like it works great! Cheers. Wizmut (talk) 02:12, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree with the other talk page participants, the article can easily be split by year. Onetwothreeip (talk) 08:43, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Also, does anyone have any clue why the 2020s page is tracking to be a similar size to the 2000s page, but the 2010s page is way smaller? LittlePuppers (talk) 19:53, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

I have been adding in all the missing films over the past year or so and haven't got round to the 2010s yet, hence why its smaller MagicalSwift (talk) 20:14, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Makes sense, thanks. LittlePuppers (talk) 20:36, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Splitting the 2000s seems pretty uncontrovertial, so I'll give it another day or so and then split that one. LittlePuppers (talk) 08:10, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

I have split out the 2000s list into articles by year. LittlePuppers (talk) 23:59, 13 January 2024 (UTC)