Moderater's note: Thread has been moved out of Bug Reports and into Customizing.

The reason the word-wrap was set to 76 characters originally was for smaller screens than we use today, however it is still appropriate for viewing on larger screens and removing that limit could make lines that are very difficult to read. Usability dictates keeping lines of text relatively short.

http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/finet...ine_length.htm

http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

...and many other similar articles.