Here's why you're wrong about using a link: Links can disappear, get changed, be blocked. A thread without an article is useless. This is why Free Republic is but a shadow of its former self, before the Washington Post lawsuit forced Jim Robinson to stop posting entire articles. Just try reading a four year old thread that has only an excerpt and a link. There's only a slight chance that the link will still yield the excerpted article. Even if the article is still there, it may have been altered.
Anyway, who cares how long an article is? It's not like trees are being chopped down to print it.