What is wrong with Wikipedia

I like Wikipedia. But I am worried about the future of Wikipedia. Why? Because it keeps growing without limit.

When Wikipedia was based, it got one thing right: the delivery of the information has to snowball. You begin with the minimal quantum of information that is self-sustainable. And then you keep iteratively expanding that. A good article at Wikipedia starts with a self-sustainable sentence, which can exist alone and provides basic description of the keyword. Then there is the rest of the first paragraph, which slightly expands the first sentence. And as the whole, the first paragraph is self-sustainable. Then there is the rest of the paragraphs that make the header. They slightly expand the description of the first paragraph. And together with the first paragraph, they are self-sustainable. And finally, there is the body, which provides the rest of the information and which is, by the fact that it completes the whole article, also self sustainable.

A good metaphor to this concept is the understanding of a picture. With the snowball approach, you first look at the picture from a distance. And you recognize a house. Then you move closer and recognize the front door and windows. You move even closer, and recognize individual parts of the doors. And finally, when you move the closest, you see details like the cracks on the door panels.

In contrast, with pinhole approach you scan the picture pixel-by-pixel. And you have to reconstruct the whole picture your mind.

While the pinhole approach is perfectly fine for computers, humans generally prefer the snowball approach. If nothing else, it allows them to skip irrelevant information like details of the clouds, because from the previous step they already know that that patch of pixels are clouds.

For long time, Wikipedia followed the snowball approach. But now, it keeps shifting to pinhole approach as the bodies of the articles keep growing without any limit.

For me, the current transition from the header to the body is frequently too abrupt. I cope with that by switching from English version of the article to some non-English version, where the articles are smaller. Most of the time, the smaller version provides all the information that I need. But even if it does not answer everything, I at least know which information I seek. And I can then quickly jump to the relevant parts in English version of the article.

But how can the situation be systematically rectified? There are multiple options:
    1) Identify an optimal size of the articles and start truncating the overgrown articles.
    2) Allow fast time traveling to time when the article was closest to the optimal size.
    3) Expandable TOC. Now, TOC doesn't even fit whole screen. Could we by default hide the lowest level headers but on click expand them?
    4) Inform Wikipedist that the article is too long and that they should abstain from making it longer. If something, they should make it shorter.
    5) Introduce another layer of granularity.

The first approach is politically unacceptable. Wikipedists like to expand articles, not to reduce them. The second approach is meaningful on topics that do not evolve rapidly, like interpretation of ancient events, but fails miserably on contemporary topics. The third approach is a nice technical solution. The forth approach might help a bit. But the last option is the only real solution that might have a chance to succeed.