Just after reading an unanswered (though pretty interesting) question in French Language, I thought that the reason it didn't get answers was that it actually asked several questions at once.
Then I formulated automatically this reflection in my head:
It's too broad
But immediately after I wondered if I shouldn't rather say:
It's too wide
Hence my question: as dictionaries seem to globally propose the same sense for both words, are there some contexts where one should be preferred to the other?
Time to write the above, I thought I identified the begin of a difference: "wide" would apply to somewthing concrete (such as a place, an object, a point of view… anything measurable), while "broad" woud rather be used for more abstract things (for example a domain of knowledge).
Note: I could find a related question, but it (and its answer too) is strictly focused on a specific context.
My own question is more [broad | wide] 🙂
Best Answer
Seems like you are content with your answer, but 'broad' is better in this context.
When you are talking about abstract nouns, i.e. nouns that aren't LITERALLY broad/wide in terms of measurable distance, the vast majority believe that it sounds better to say 'broad'.
In the above example, a 'gap' is a distance I can measure with a ruler, so I use 'wide'. In the example below, 'knowledge' is not something to which I can assign an absolute value, so I use 'broad'.
However, if you want to say 'lots of things', which is an abstract (non-measurable) concept, then you would say 'a wide range [of things]' rather than 'a broad range [of things]'. That's basically the only exception though.