Talk:United States women's national soccer team results (2000–2019)

Beware of Wikipedia's technical limits

I've noticed some back-and-forth regarding an article split and reversion of the split.

Sometimes large Wikipedia articles have to be split even if the article would be better as an encyclopedia article if left as a single Wikipedia page. This is due to Wikipedia's technical limitations.

One very common limit that large sporting-related articles run into is the "Template include size" limit. This is because the flag icons work. The biggest symptom of such pages is that templates at the end of the page do not work right. You can see this at the bottom of this old, pre-split version of the article from 12:10, 23 February 2020 (UTC). Articles that are "over the limit" are automatically placed in Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded so that they can attract the attention of editors like me who watch out for things like this.

Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done in the short term to change the limits of Wikipedia's software. I think there is some effort going on to re-do the way flags are displayed that might help in articles that are slightly over the limit (see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Flag Template), but even those changes won't help if an article is, say, 50% over the limit, and it won't help at all on articles that are over the limit for reasons other than using a lot of flag icons.

For technical details and to help out with other articles that are affected by this limit, take a look at Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 17:47, 24 February 2020 (UTC)