Wikipedia:Splitting

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If an article becomes too large, or a section of an article has a length that is out of proportion to the rest of the article, it is often appropriate for some or all of the article to be split into new articles. In some cases, refactoring an article into child or sister articles can allow subtopics to be discussed more fully elsewhere without dominating a general overview article to which they are non-central (but only if the new articles are themselves sufficiently notable to be included in the encyclopedia).

The two main reasons for splitting material out from an article are size and content relevance. If either the whole article, or the specific material within one section becomes too large, or if the material is seen to be inappropriate for the article due to being out of scope, then a split may be considered or proposed. Consideration must be given to size, notability and potential neutrality issues before proposing or carrying out a split.

Articles should be neither too big nor too small.

At 50 kB of readable prose and above it may benefit the reader to consider moving some sections to new articles and replace them with summaries per . Consideration, however, needs to be given to the amount and quality of material to be moved. If the material for the new article is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of the subject, or would simply duplicate the summary that would be left behind, then it may be too soon to move it. Unsourced material shouldn't be used to create new articles as it may have notability or verifiability issues.

Below 50 kB, an article may not need splitting based on size alone, and at 40 kB and below a split would generally only be justified based on content issues.

These guidelines apply somewhat less to disambiguation pages and naturally do not apply to redirects. They also apply less strongly to list articles, especially if splitting them would require breaking up a sortable table.

Sometimes two or more distinct topics may share the same or similar title, such as "light", which may refer to electromagnetic radiation, a component that produces light or spiritual illumination. Sometimes the distinct topics may be closely related, such as Coffea (the plant) and coffee (the product), or thermal energy and heat.

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