Wikipedia talk:Stub

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

NOTE: Most of the discussion relating to this and other stub categories occurs at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting. You may wish to consider leaving a note there rather than here.

Warning: Stubitis!
Enlarge
Warning: Stubitis!

Contents

[edit] how to find or fix a stub

Help: There are over 1000 Wikipedia links to "Find or fix a stub", which now redirect to this page. But this page does not tell you how to find or fix a stub. Tempshill 23:29, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

"Finding stubs" section was added, as per request. --Sn0wflake 23:59, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
Excellent, thank you. Tempshill 20:56, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Great.And now where's the help for fixing a stub? I'm a n00b at wiki, it would really be helpful.Gray62

The whole of the article addresses that. Also, pleas sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~) --Sn0wflake 01:38, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

Oops, sry. Hmm, obviously, I'm a total doofus, but reading this article I still have a very fuzzy picture of the difference between a 'real ' article and a stub. For instance, should the stub template be removed at some point? And what happens if I remove it? It would be really gr8 if someone would make an article on this that someone not so familiar with wiki could understand. Gray62 14:40, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

Catagorizing stubs is much easier if the contributor has at least marked them as {stub} at all, I propose changing the Project page stub directions to let new contributors know that it is better to mark the article {stub} then to not mark it at all Xaosflux 05:09, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
When the article no longer qualifies as a stub, the stub tag should be removed. That is why the page says "Once a stub has been properly expanded and becomes an article rather than just a stub, you or any editor may remove the stub tag from it. No admin action or formal permission is needed." Is that unclear? When the stub tag is removed, the article is no longer listed in the stub category, and the stub notice no longer appears at the bottom of the article. DES (talk) 15:07, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

Hmm sry, some misunderstanding here on my part. I'm looking for info how to properly expand a stub. What is the necessary minimum for an article? Checking 'Wikipedia:What is an article' now. Maybe someone could take a look at The Hurricane (1999 movie) and tell me if there's anything missing, pls? Gray62 15:25, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

A stub can be expanded by adding any relevant information that is not already present. What that might be depends on the article in question. Basically any article with enough content not to be a stub is an article, albiet perhaps a short one. What it takes to be a "full" or "complete" article is another matter -- for the other extreme, see WP:FAC. One important thing that articels should have but many stubs lack is cited sources. See Wikipedia:Cite sources for more on this, and see Wikipedia:Footnote3 for one tool some editors use for this purpose. Another thing is a proper category -- pretty much every article should be in at least one category, and the stub category will be removed when the stub tag is removed. Beyon that there are no particualr rules -- the more reliable, relevant, sourced, NPOV content the better, IMO. Happy editing. DES (talk) 15:54, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] removal of images

Where can I find the discussion about the removal of images from various stub templates? Zscout370 (Sound Off) 02:30, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Suspend use of stub icons. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 01:46, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
I've added a line discouraging the use of icons at Wikipedia:Stub#Creating_the_stub_template. Grutness...wha? 13:41, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Stubbing

I considered altering and adding stub tags to articles stubbing. Should we make an article with that name? --SuperDude 15:36, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

I didn't quite understand what you meant, but creating such entry would be the same as shooting our own foot, as the intention of this page is reuniting all information about stubs in one place. The term stubbing is somewhat of a neologism, also. That page would be better off redirecting to here. --Sn0wflake 19:57, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] stub template position

This page says

These stub templates should invariably be placed at the bottom of the article.

Is that strictly required? I prefer to put the stub template above headings such as External links or References, and succession boxes or related concept boxes. This way readers will realise the article is incomplete (and consider adding to it) before they get to the "boring" stuff at the bottom of the page. An alternate wording might be These stub templates should be placed at the bottom of the text of the article. --ScottDavis 04:28, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As things stand, what is said on the article is the rule. Invariably means invariably. However, you might want to bring this discussion up at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting. --Sn0wflake 04:52, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
He took your advice. As Grutness pointed out in that discussion, the stub template basically says "this is all we have, and we need more", implying there's nothing beyond it when in fact there is. --Elembis 13:43, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)
I agree with Scott's reasoning - I used to place all my stub msgs above those section, after main body. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 11:28, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)


Has the policy changed, or did someone unilatterally change it? The page now says, "By convention, these stub templates should be placed near the bottom of the article." Much weaker than "invariably". Stub template placement is something that really does cry out for standardization. I see stub templates all over the place; some look like the last entry in a list of links or references, and do not stand out. Enclosing them in a shaded box might help; centering might help. Finell 05:52, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Boilerplate index

I've added a line pointing at this page to the end of the See Also list @ WP:BPT Courtland 17:35, 2005 Jun 4 (UTC)

[edit] Ethno-stub died?

Template:Ethno-stub seems to have disappeared for no good reason I can ascertain...any help? Tomer TALK 04:49, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

For reasons best known to himself, Stevertigo decided to delete the template. It's been restored. Grutness...wha? 06:36, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Thanky kindly, good sir. Tomer TALK 08:18, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Stub

Given that the category is now Category:Stubs, should this page be similarly named? Grutness...wha? 06:23, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable, provided appropriate redirects. Tomer TALK 08:17, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Stubsensor cleanup project

Hello,

Would anyone mind if I added a blurb about the Stubsensor cleanup project (example: User:Triddle/stubsensor/20050516)? Perhaps we can also consolidate and try to come up with good criteria for judging when an article is no longer a stub? Triddle 21:58, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

  • Hey there, Triddle. Indeed, your Stubsensor would make a nice addition to this page. I will include it right away. Stub size, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely. Our main problem comes from the fact that there isn't much to say about certain subjects and that there is too much to say about others. There are also articles with little content and huge tables/lists which give very little useful information. So the whole discussion becomes a mess most of the time. But please give your opinion on this matter, either here or on the WP:WSS. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 01:36, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
    • Yes indeed it is hard to tell what is a stub and what is not. I've attacked this on two levels: in my software and in the organization of the cleanup projects. I believe the proper solution is proper and good communication. Here is what my take is on the matter: A stub is short enough to contain an interesting point or two but overall does not contain enough detail to be a full article but only if it can be expanded by an average person. If its already reached the level of requiring extensive research or college courses it should probably have the {{expand}} tag put on it and list why. Additionally if the article has glaring omissions it should have the expand tag put on it and list the omissions and how to fix it. The more we can improve the signal to noise ratio on the stub tags I believe the more we can let them do their intended job: make it easy for your average person to improve Wikipedia. Thats just my philosophy though. Triddle 05:09, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)
      • We must be on the right track then, since that's more or less what is already being said on the article, but the expansion tag is something that hadn't been considered so far. The only problem I see is that this would be a great guideline for WP:WSS, but I don't see the average user "getting" the spirit of the idea. --Sn0wflake 17:52, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Rationale for stub types

Please excuse if this is covered somewhere in voluminous texts covering the art of stubbing. I haven't read them all, but it humbly seems to me that this question should have an answer somewhere prominent within the documentation. It seems to me that whether an article is a stub or not is a characteristic orthoginal to its categorization(s) within the "[[Category:*]]" hierarchy, and it is semantically sufficient to tag an article as (say) "{{tl|stub}}" and "[[Category:Communications satellites]]". For the use case of "Show me all stubs in the category 'communications satellites'" (which seems to have been the motivation for stub categories), it seems to me that this would best be handled by the MediaWiki software — not for it to specifically support the "{{tl|stub}}" tag, but generally to support queries involving arbitrary combinations of text content, tags (and absence of tags), and category membership (and for that matter any of the other metadata maintained by the MediaWiki software). Further, it seems to me that the stub hierarchy, and whatever other tag hierarchies are on the horizon (e.g. {{com-cleanup}}, {{com-POV}}, etc.) will plunge Wikipedia into a massive infinite-monkey ontological cross product. Thanks. —Fleminra June 28, 2005 09:41 (UTC)

  • It is absolutely true that the cross-product of label-stub with label-category-X should be sufficient to alert persons to articles that are stubs in their area of interest. However, there is not a way in which these cross-products can be visualized at the category level for a particular article (to the best of my knowledge). The current visualization tools available in "preferences" are not up to the task. If advances in the WikiMedia software would address this, for instance adding ability to rank on a scale of 1-to-3 or 1-to-5 the "completeness" of an article and accomodate this as a poll for each article and have the running avg-count and median-count and count-of-voters viewable at the category level, that would make the stub-typing going on here obsolete. I just today outlined another solution type to potentially allow the eradication of small stubtype categories (thereby allowing true implementation of the 100+ article guideline) in the discussion around deletion of {{Nickelodeon-stub}} (see Wikipedia:Stub_types_for_deletion#.7B.7Btl.7CNickelodeon-stub.7D.7D). Still another way to try to reduce the proliferation of stubtypes is by double-stubbing, adding two different stub templates that are orthogonal; where there are many articles that would need double-stubbing, new stubtypes are being created according to area classes, such as geo for geography class, bio for biography class, etc. where a double-stubbed article to {{Canada-stub}} and {{Bio-stub}} now can go to {{Canada-bio-stub}}. Cross-products are useful but usually only when they are instantiated then then usually when they are only instantiated partially. Thus, what would be quite useful is to modify the MediaWiki software to all the instantiation of cross-product nodes between stub and category at will from within any particular category, so that a pseudo-category would be created that would be category-x-stub which would not be creatable by a human, but would be created on the fly each time a category is accessed and would appear as a sub-category containing a subset of articles in the real category. However, in the end the easiest way to do away with the stub-type solution is to have comprehensive coverage of WikiProjects for areas of active interest, those WikiProjects maintaining interest-area lists of articles in need of attention for use by participants in the project. The primary social reason for the existence of stubtypes is the univeral editing nature of how Wikipedia has grown; the assumption is that anyone walking in off the street who might be interested in an area should find it easy to find a stub in her area of interest ... and the easiest way of accomplishing that to date is via stubtypes. I hope this goes some way toward addressing your questions. I'm sure that I've not related all options or considerations here, in which case others adding to this is necessary to give you the whole picture. Courtland July 1, 2005 00:00 (UTC)

[edit] Request

Can the page have a few "links outwards" (especially for those of us coming from the Community portal page, who want to be helpful and find a few stubs to cure).

I don't think I understand what you mean. Could you try elaborating a little? --Sn0wflake 1 July 2005 00:36 (UTC)

[edit] stubbers and stub-sorters

There may be people who are not interested in stub sorting and would only perform generic stubbing using only the tag, {{stub}}. Because there are so many stubs to choose from, it can be a barrier to complete the whole stubbing process. Therefore, it is adequate that one can just perform only one step of generic stubbing with its purpose of bringing attention to the newly discovered stub article. Thus there are two roles, stubbers and stub-sorters, whom work together to efficiently meet Wikipedia's stubbing goals. Comments? -- Zondor 2 July 2005 17:25 (UTC)

[edit] Somewhat radical suggestion about stub templates

I just got done unloading some word at Wikipedia_talk:Template_standardisation and that got me to thinking ... I am considering whether the categorisation of a stub-article via affixing a specific stub type need be reflected on the article page as it currently is. The current anatomy of a stub-template message looks like

(optional image) (topic message) (entreaty to expand the article)

A large part of the template standardisation discussion revolves around making template messages unobtrusive but noticable and clearly distinguishing them from the article content. There is a suggestion to have all templates in boxes with certain characteristics across all Wikipedia. I don't think that would fly in fully open discussion, but at present the group involved is implementing a standard across templates without discussion or notice on the talk pages, the notion being that they'll deal with it when someone complains or reverts.

In order to head off this wave without making a federal case of it (blowing it out of proportion), we might take the initiative in doing some stub-type-wide changes ourself. Here is my proposal:

  1. the stub-template message be contracted down to a combination of the old "stub" image and a topic-specific image - no text except that might appear as part of the image
  2. the stub-template be placed at the top, to the far left of the page
  3. markup the stub-template image to go to the topical stub category
  4. the stub-type category be listed in the category listing, preferably last, but would be added as part of the template addition as it now is
  5. all existing stub categories and stub type processes be kept the same

The point of all this is doing away with the perceived user requirement that the topic of the stub-template be included in the template message. In point of fact, the topic is related redundantly and in some cases confusingly by appearing 3 times ... as part of the stub-template title, as the name of the stub-type category, and in the text of the stub-template message. Also, the help-request in the stub template message is redundant with the "edit this page". All articles can use help in some way; the stub template just emphasizes that maybe this article needs more help than others in the same topic area.

This is a rather radical suggestion and I'm not aggresively supportive of it, but I do think that considering it in the light of how to improve the stub-associated experience for readers and contributers (not in this case for stubbers .. though all 3 can be instantiated in one person).

Thanks for listening. Courtland July 4, 2005 14:37 (UTC)

If I understood what you mean, you are proposing that the template would be converted to something similar to what the Wikiportal template is, right? A simple box with an image defining that it is a stub (the old "puzzle piece" image) and an indicator of what stub category it belongs to, floating at the upper-left corner of the article.
I do find the idea to be interesting, but I fear that the scope of the changes might result in a sizable amount of article-breaking. Nevertheless, it could be implemented, but it would probably be best if a mockup version of the template was made and put somewhere on the Wikipedia namespace, so that all parties interested could evaluate and discuss it. --Sn0wflake 4 July 2005 15:18 (UTC)

[edit] Another suggestion about stub definitions

There has been much discussion about what constitutes a stub.

Could we consider adding to the "identifying a stub" section something like:

It is sometimes unclear to the reader why an article has been given the label of "stub". When putting on a stub-template consider starting a discussion thread on the article's talk page that indicates what you, as the person who labelled the article as a stub or who altered the stub-type, believe is missing from the article. This provides a further assistance to potential contributors by not only highlighting that the article needs expansion, but also what is needed.

This is far too wordy, but something along these lines of sentiment might be useful to add somewhere, either here or in one of the pages related to the WP:WSS.

Courtland 15:44, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

This might be an useful guideline for, say, "stubbers", who seem to think that they are making a great contribution to the Wikipedia by sending every damn article which has a slight flaw to Category:Stubs by means of placing a generic stub tag on them. As of late, it's becoming very hard to understand why certain articles are being tagged as a stub. Unwikified articles shouldn't be sent to the stub cat, in the same way copyvios should not, in the same way articles with no cateogry should not. So I would love an explanation in these cases. But on a general basis, this does not serve much purpose. Pretty much all of the time, it is fairly clear what a stub lacks. --Sn0wflake 17:43, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] at what point is a stub no longer a stub?

At what point is a stub entry no longer a stub but an actual article? I've been working on the Sam Seder article, and don't feel it's finished, but it's certainly more fleshed out then when I came across it. I even added his filmography, and figured out how to include his picture. However, I've pretty much exhausted my research for the time being. I'm sure others can later improve upon what I've done.

I don't know if it's okay for me to remove the bio-stub reference that was included on the page when I found it, or if I'm supposed to let other people do that? Maybe y'all vote.. or something..? Or can I just remove it? Thanks ahead of time for any responses. ZachsMind 02:07, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Well the rule of thumb on WP:STUB is "10 fairly short sentances or three paragraphs" but it warns that that is jsut a rule of thumb. In genral a stub is, IMO, an article so short as to be obviously lacking key info needed to cover the subject, so short that people must be exorted to expand it, and the reader cautioned not to rely on it to include adequate coverage. An article doesn't need to be so tagged can just have the stub tag removed -- no vote or approval is needed. I have done some stubsorting recently, mostly in book-stub, and found several articles that didn't look like stubs to me. I checked the history to see the state of the article when the stub tag was applied. if here had been significant expansion, and the article didn't feel like a stub to me, I removed the tag. This is just my view, nothing official, of course. DES 04:37, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

The article you mention - Sam Seder - is no longer a stub, as it goes beyond defining the subject and giving general information about it. It also goes beyond "3 to 10 short sentences", which is a metric which, despite not absolute, is generally agreed upon by the members of the WP:WSS. Removing the stub tag is the best action to take, I believe. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 05:44, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Good. I'll remove the stub tag. Thanks for the input. =) -- ZachsMind 11:18, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

I came to the Stub article with the same question, and went to this talk to ask it if nobody else had. I suggest putting some mention of this in the main article. It's one thing to know what a stub is; it's another to know when/how to remove the stub tag. :) --DragonHawk 03:40, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

Done, in the "Identifing a stub" section. DES (talk) 03:56, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
I still had trouble finding it -- maybe a subheading that says 'Protocol for Removing a Stub'?Kit 23:17:38, 2005-08-25 (UTC)
Done. See the new section "No longer a stub?" DES (talk) 00:27, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

I note that my previous text, in the "Identifing a stub" section, was removed without discussion by Sn0wflake in this edit with an edit summary saying that consensus should be reached first. I was under the impression that there is consensus for the principle that when an article has been developed beyond the stub level, any editor may remove the stub tag. Is this not the case? DES (talk) 00:40, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Until recently, a sentence covering that had been on the article, but it was removed at some point for no apparent reason. --Sn0wflake 22:10, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
I don't think converting the small separate section I had inserted on this into a single sentence in the middle of a paragrpah that otherwise talks about the naming conventions for stub tags makes it easier to find, and from the above comments some users found this info hard to find in the past. I have moved this to what seems to me a more logical place (under identifing rather than categorising) and made it a short 2-sentence paragraphs, but not a sepaeate section. I would apprieciate the views of an editor other than Sn0wflake on the merits of this placement, and of the longer version which I wrote up the other day, and Sn0wflake converted to a single sentence. DES (talk) 22:30, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Since you also brought this up at "Alternate stub standard", I would ask that this discussion was resumed there for a matter of organisation. --Sn0wflake 22:42, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
To my way of thinking these are two quite separate issues, and I would prefer to keep them separate. Also, I think you misinterpreted my comment below -- I did not intend to refer to this in the "Alternate stub standard" thread. DES (talk) 23:01, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
-Sn0wflake wrote (in a section below): "Can you please read that paragraph once more and see that the first three sentences say exactly the same thing?" --Sn0wflake 22:38, 26 August 2005 (UTC) They are somewhat redundant, and perhaps needed improvement. they were intended to say 1) when an article is no longer a stub, the stub tag should be removed. 2) An editor who has just expanded a stub may remove the tag. 3) an editor who discovefrs a former stub still tagged may also remove the tag. This was written to empahsize the point, and in light of the comments by ZachsMind, DragonHawk, and Kit in this section, and of other users elsewhere, that they felt the guideline did not help editors unsure when it was permissable and expected to remove a stub tag. in light of this I thought a full section was desireable. At the least I think a separate short paragraph, not a sentence in the middle of a paragraph on a different subject, is needed. Does anyone else have an opnion? DES (talk) 23:01, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Stub position

Aren't stub templates supposed to be put right after the article text, but before the See also and External links? I made that change but it was reverted. - Omegatron 00:20, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

That is the usual procedure, yes. However, due to varying opinions on the issue, we left this open to interpretation. I personally think that is is not the best procedure. Sorry, I had misread your message. I believe that the stub tag should come just before the Category links and inwikis, in order to avoid clutter, since stubs are supposed to be unobstrusive metadata. But again, it's open to interpretation. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 00:27, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
The discussion can be found here. Personally, I'm in favour of the "right at the bottom, before the cats and interwiki links" approach. But unless consensus is reached on a particular approach, it's probably best to leave it open to interpretation. --TheParanoidOne 00:34, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Options are fine, but new users get confused if they don't have more specific information. I placed an explanation of the usual placement in the "Categorizing stubs" section. --Blainster 20:01, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

One advantage of placing stub templates after category tags is that the stub categories will then appear after the substantive categories in the rendered page. Pissant 00:38, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] minimum stub size

User:Loganberry recently added text to the page that says that a one sentance stub is acceptable, at least in the view of some users. I know that some people do think thsi, but is there still a consensus on something like the 3 sentance minimum for a "good" stub? DES (talk) 20:43, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

  • Well, the only "good" stub is a "dead" stub [|:). Beyond that, though, and avoiding the one sentence can be as long as a paragraph problem, I think that if a person can't write 100 words, then that person is just making a post-it-note contribution. For instance, right about HERE is 50 words. I would contend that a stub should contain more information than typically found on a post-it-note. Courtland 03:23, August 17, 2005 (UTC)
  • Which is true: it is acceptable in the view of some users. As for my own view, I don't think that a one-sentence stub is a desirable thing, but nor do I think a short stub is necessarily worse than nothing. If person A writes a "Post-it note contribution" and then person B comes across it (maybe via "Random article") and expands it a bit, and then this process gradually continues, then Wikipedia is working as it should; whereas a non-existent article would not turn up in the Random search in the first place. I think an article saying something like "Exampleton is a town in Worcestershire, England. At the 2001 census it had a population of around 12,000." is far from perfect, but better than having nothing at all. Loganberry (Talk) 03:34, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
You've at least provided enough info for disambiguation and establishing notability. I've found some articles that looked more like "Exampleton is in England." or "Exampleton is a town." There's no point having the stub if it isn't long enough to identify and establish notability of the intended subject. It should also be in the right category(ies), as people watch their favourite categories for new articles appearing in them. --Scott Davis Talk 10:03, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
"Exampleton is a town" does establish notability. One sentence is fine as a start. Carina22 22:06, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stub club?

We could really use a stub club because there are so many stubs and actually I find them useful because they're short enough to read quickly you can learn alot from stubs. Maybe we could start one on yahoo groups because they probably won't let us have one at wikipedia.com or we could use google groups because that may be better they have better software. If you want to start a stub club let me know thanks.

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting more or less is the stub club here. Drop by. DES (talk) 22:06, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Alternate stub standard

I just added (or rather re-added) a paragraph to the "Identifing a stub" section thqt starts with "Another standard". I think this is a useful way to make the "debth of coverage" notion of a stub (as opposed to the "length" notion expressed in the 3-10 sentances rule of thumb) clear. I had added this paragraph soem time ago, and it was removed without discussion. If anyone thinks this is improper, please discuss the matter here. DES (talk) 00:34, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

I will try to be objective here. First, we don't need a standard which is based on what you believe should be the standard. This is a guideline article built through consensus. Your paragraph was removed without discussion? Maybe because it was added without discussion? Are you sure all agree with your version of the standard? Second, the wording is not very good. How much is "little or nothing"? What is a "knowledgeble user"? How long does one take to make "significant research", ten minutes? Articles have varying degrees of information avaliablity. Not finding meaningful content in 10 minutes may mean nothing. Please, don't try to push what you think into the guideline. I am reverting it out. --Sn0wflake 21:24, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Fine. I would note this is not simply soemthing i invented -- It was an attempt to distill comment I had seen made here, on the stubsorting page, and I think on the pump. I was under the strong impression that, in a general way, what I was expressing was already the consensus, it had just never been properly codified and written up. So I was bold and added it to the guideline page. Note that it was phrased as a rough rule of thumb, not as mandatory policy. If the wording needs improvement let's improve it rather than just delete it. But since you obviosuly object, I'll put the text here and ask for suggestions and views, and see if there is a consensus for something along these lines, or if one will develop. okay? DES (talk) 22:17, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
I also object to your labeling the removal of a paragraph of text, after i gave my reasons for inserting it here, as a minor edit. DES (talk) 22:34, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Regarding the alternative definition: You may do whatever you find to be of the project's best interest. I will not object to the discussion of an alternative definition in case people actually find it to be of need. Regarding the removal of the paragraph: Can you please read that paragraph once more and see that the first three sentences say exactly the same thing? --Sn0wflake 22:38, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
I was referring here to to the removal of the "alternative definition" paragraph. I have responded to your comments on the "when to remove the stub tag" paragraph above. DES (talk) 23:03, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed "depth of coverage" standard

I think that most editors here agree that a mere mechanical counting of words, sentances, or paragraphs does not suffice to identify a stub. A topic completeluy covered in eight sentances is not a stub, and an article with twenty sentances but that barely is a skeleton coverage of its subject is clearly a stub. (For example, can you imagine the article on Freedom of speech reduced to twenty sentances not being a stub?) of course there is a wide gap between stub and featured article, indeeed most articles exist in that gap.

I attempted to capture a rough rule of thumb for this concept of what makes a stub. Sn0wflake objected that I had no consenssu and that what I wrote was poorly written. So I am asking for coments on the merits of this idea, and how to improve my expression of it. I am hoping to achieve consensus on a revised version of this text, which would then go onto the project page. DES (talk) 22:46, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

inital draft of proposed text: Another way to define a stub is that an article so incomplete that a user who knows little or nothing about the topic could improve its content after a superficial internet search or 10 minutes in a reference library is quite probably a stub. One that can only be improved by a rather knowledgeable user, or after significant research, may not be a stub.

Comments and sugestions, please. DES (talk)</sup> 22:46, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Sounds smart to me. Maurreen (talk) 02:23, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
I'd substitute "internet" instead of "google" (thereby allowing the user to choose their preferred search tool). Otherwise looks OK. Perhaps add something like Of course, even a stub must contain enough information to adequately identify the subject intended by its author to avoid the ""Exampleton is a town" problem described above. --Scott Davis Talk 05:47, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
Looks good - I suggest you post a comment about ths discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting, since its WSS who deal most with these things. Grutness...wha? 06:55, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

Done, and at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals, too. DES (talk) 17:52, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Nice -- I welcome some stub definitions. I remember I had an revert argument about this, the arguments which can be seen on the history of Dorotea Municipality.
I'd change the wording of the second sentense of your proposition. I think that an article that needs, say 30 minutes of research to expand, and when it is believed by the writer that no major subjects are left out, then it is not a stub anymore.
Fred-Chess 13:08, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
Would this system would require stub-sorters to spend half an hour checking if the article can be improved on? I tend to re-tag at least fifty stubs per day with more accurate tags when I'm working on the project. Would I be required to spend half an hour on each one? GeeJo (talk) 15:54, August 28, 2005 (UTC)
No, that would be foolish. First of all this is an alternative standard, not a replacement. My idea is that when you say to yourself "hmm, it's got 12 sentances, but it still feels stubby" or "only six sentances, but seems complete" you cna ask yourself "do i think a random editor could probably improve this with just a quick google or other net search?" if the answer is yes, it is a stub. if the answer is no, then it isn't a stub. This is something for people to think about when deciding whether to inseret, keep, or remove a stub tag, not something to be measure with a stop watch. It is at best a rule of thumb. If something is clearly a stub, this standard is irrelevant. This is mostly for borderline cases. DES (talk) 17:11, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
I was planning on not interfering, but seriously, isn't that exactly what the sentence "Note that a longer article may be a stub if the topic is complex enough; conversely, a short article on a topic which has a very narrow scope may not be a stub" covers? --Sn0wflake 17:34, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
Basically, which is why I didn't origianlly think I needed to seek explicit consensus for this paragraph. This is intended to be an expansion and clarification of the idea in that sentance, to try to give a rough operational test for when it applies. Also, that senatance has often been overlooked and people have argued about whether something is or isn't a stub based purely on length (in words or sentances, usually). I wanted there to be something clearer and more prominent to convety that idea, and something to point at when justifing a decision. I didn't think i was really introducing a new idea, or changing the estalished consensus, merely rewriting to better convey that consensus. That most comments have been positive makes me tend to think that I was right about the idea. The wording may be a different matter. DES (talk) 17:49, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
But why bother creating time-based definitions and such when the concept is already there? The guideline does not need to take people by the hand and show them exactly what to do, especially on an area as inconceivably hazy as stub-sorting. The whole size matter has never been something which was set in stone. The general consensus, up to this point, was: "Follow the 3-10 sentences guideline in a general manner, but USE GOOD SENSE, DAMMIT!". Any serious stub-sorter grasps that concept, eventually. Just let people use good sense. It rarely fails. --Sn0wflake 02:03, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
just my two cents here....I think that the guys who take stub-sorting serious have always been conscious of the pertaining question, and have been removing stub-notices all the way...although I appreciate the effort gone into this here, I simply don't see people reacting to it; they will continue to stubsort according to the length of the article, and (here I go again) stub sorting isn't, in the first place, about judging the quality and content of the article, but to get it where it will be noticed (or so we all hope), and there, "specialists" can take care of whether it is to be considered a stub or not...Lectonar 08:11, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
This was aimed not so much at the experienced stub-sorters, the people who deal with inserting, changing, and removing stub tags all the time, as at the more casual editor who needs to decide whenther the article s/he has just created is a stub, or whether the one s/he has just expanded is still a stub. I am trying more to put into words what the expereinced stub-sorters already know and do than to change existing practice. DES (talk) 16:05, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
Responding to GeeJo:
I think you and I are referring to opposite things. Because you seem to tag articles as stub -- whereas I often de-stub pages, and then have people come and stub them again.
There will probably always be this problem. When I write about very small municipalities in Sweden, I find it very hard to find any relevant information. I may spend an hour searching, in vain, just to try and get rid of the "stub" tag. Naturally, if I fail, it seems unlikely "any one" could "easily" expand the article. For instance, I dare you to expand on Haquin Spegel... or an even better example would by Folke Johansson Ängel where there just isn't any more information that I know... as I said on the history-article page I provided for Dorotea Municipality above, it is just be a waste of time tagging such articles as "stubs", because eventhough they are short, they will probably remain short for years, until a professor or similar knowledgeable person comes along. Fred-Chess 17:15, August 29, 2005 (UTC)

I see several editors respondign favorably to this, and only one who seems strongly opposed, and more on the grounds of redundancy than anything else, If I understand Sn0wflake's comments correctly. I take that as sufficient support for this change, and i am goign to isneret the text above in the page. it can always be removed if the consensus shifts. DES (talk) 16:05, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Source of content

Hi there, having a minor dispute with another editor as to whether Marlborough, Massachusetts (and several others) should be considered a stub. Are articles whose content is 95% derived from bots considered stubs? As to this example, it has exactly one line of information not added by a bot or a template. Tim Rhymeless (Er...let's shimmy) 02:31, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

IMO, the source of the content doesn't matter, teh length and depth does. I don't think i would call Marlborough, Massachusetts a stub, although it is marginal on depth IMO, I don't care whetehr a bot added content or a human did. If a bot can add enough content to an artilce to take it beyond the stub stage, then it isn't a stub. DES (talk) 19:05, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
I think i've seen a lot of these articles about (to be honest) smaller US-communities, and they all follow up the same scheme; and I agree with DES here, that isn't a stub anymore...Lectonar 07:21, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
Pity, that's not quite the answer I wanted to hear, though I'll go with it. It just troubles me to think that they might receive less attention without a stub tag. Tim Rhymeless (Er...let's shimmy) 01:57, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
It's certainly a stub. Most of the bot information is useless stuff that human's wouldn't bother to write. Almost everything about the town of 36,000 is still missing months later. Carina22 22:08, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Here's my personal take on the issue: Awhile back there was a project to check all the articles that were marked as stubs. If they were too large, the stub templates were removed. As far as I can tell, stub templates were removed from ALL the User:Rambot-generated articles. I felt that was very, very wrong at the time, and still feel the same today. When I am decided if an article is a stub, I do not count any of the Rambot-generated Demographic or Geography data. If a US city, community, or census-designated place article has only a few sentences that were not created by Rambot, then the article is still very much a stub and needs a geo-stub template. This issue should probably be addressed in the Stub article.

Marlborough, Massachusetts only has three sentences that were not created by User:Rambot. IT IS A STUB! BlankVerse ∅ 07:39, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Color change

The project page was just edited to but some of the prototype code on a red background. I think this makes it harder to read. What was the reason for this change? DES (talk) 16:05, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

It was edited by an anon with only that one edit. I have reverted it as vandalism. --TheParanoidOne 19:14, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Phillipine writers

The stub {{phil-lit-stub}} somehow ends up linking to Category:Stubs, making it appear that a load of phillipine literature is in need of classification. Could someone sort this out? It's... Thelb4! 16:17, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Includeonly for stub categories on templates

Since includeonly tags have been added, some stub templates have been edited to use them around the category link, while most haven't. While I see the point of using them (the template itself isn't a stub), it does make it harder to navigate from the template to the category (or tell that the template even has a matching category). Perhaps if includeonly is to be used, a link to the category could be put in noinclude tags? (altho I'd rather leave the templates as they were before) Either way, it'd be nice if there was some consistency and consensus... --Mairi 00:25, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

I just did this (noinclude) on {{Malta-stub}} .. the category template does include a link to the template itself. Should this be an official part of the documentation? Srl 19:59, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
Looks good to me. I'd suggest perhaps rolling this style out on a few stub types gradually, and seeing if people yelp on the one hand, or applaud and adopt on the other. (Or remain profoundly unmoved either way, indeed.) Alai 06:45, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Addition

Further to some discussions on Wikipedia talk:Schools, I added Having an interwiki link, or at least one relevant picture also lends weight to it's claim to be a stub. to the definition of a stub. The purpose of this is to help define the minimum criteria that an article should have in order not to be merged automatically up into a parent article. The implication is that having a picture, or an article on another language wiki, makes it more likely that the stub will expand, or less convenient and useful to merge. Thoughts? Trollderella 09:21, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

I would like to see some logical basis for this criteria, as in the whole of my experience with stub-sorting and related activities, I have never noticed that as being meaningful. The article becomes more likely to expand if its text is compreensive. That's it. If you include this criteria, 70% of the stub articles will get merged, which is just a bad idea. --Sn0wflake 16:32, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
If this is changed, I'd like to suggest that the criteria from WP:CORP concerning not counting self promotional sources of data not be considered in the content being counted. Vegaswikian 19:17, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I think I was unclear, these things are 'ors', not 'ands', I am suggesting that, in addition to the current definition of having 3-8 sentences, we say 'either 3-8 sentences, an interwiki link, or a picture' are the things that make the difference between a sub-stub to be merged and a stub to be kept. I believe it broadens the scope of acceptable stubs. Thoughts? Vegaswikian, I'm sort of confused, because what I added to this was that if an article had an interwiki lnk or a picture then we should count it as a stub - the criteria about text was already there. Trollderella 19:29, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
To reitterate, I was proposing adding "Having an interwiki link, or at least one relevant picture also lends weight to its claim to be a stub.". The reason being that having an interwiki link to an actual article on another language wiki means that an article has been written, and implies that there is a possibility to write one in english, and having a picture makes it more difficult to merge, because of the size. Trollderella 19:39, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
I presume that you are arguign that such links make an article more properly a stub, rather than a sub-stub that may be fit only for merging or deletion. But much of the Stub page is more concerned with distinguising between stubs and non-stub, but short, articles. To say that a feature "makes something be counted as a stub" can incorrectly be seen as part oc the upper boundery rather than the lower unless the wording is quite clear. Besides, we don't formally recognize sub-stubs, and the normal answer for soemthing below the lower boundry is expansion rather than deeltion or merger, so i don't think this addition has much value. DES (talk) 19:46, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
My primary motivation for wanting to add it is related to a discussion that is current on Wikipedia talk:Schools, where a lot of users are concerned about the point at which a school article is suitable to be merged, and at what point is should be kept as a stub. It's a real, and acrimonious, debate, and adding these two (fairly incocuous, I think) criteria to the stub definition is a rare point of concensus that looks like it may provide peace on the school deletion wars. Are there concerns you have about practical implications of this? Thanks, Trollderella 19:51, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
What can I say other than "please don't drag the stub sorting project into the schools-on-Wikipedia mess"? The fact is that merger is not the general rule, but rather the exception. We hardly merge anything, instead expanding the article by a bit, turning it into a small stub. Now, for schools, the rules you are proposing seem quite logical, but that should be dealt with within the schoold project, instead of being generalized. Regards, --Sn0wflake 22:41, 15 November 2005 (UTC)


[edit] section stub

I remember seeing a stub marker for just a section of an atricle, rather the whole thing. This page doesn't mention it though. Is it supposed to be used? (unsigned comment by 67.165.96.26 at 17:57, 30 November 2005 --BigBlueFish 19:23, 30 November 2005 (UTC))

[edit] Triple-stubbing considered anathema?

Does anyone else feel the current wording, that "using more than two [stub tags] is strongly discouraged" is far too strong? This just doesn't take into consideration the practicalities of the categorisation scheme, and the stub categories in particular, where we try to avoid "over-splitting" categories in such a way as to make them overly small. If someone is, for example, an American sports journo, we're up to three equally applicable stub categories already, even if the subject isn't also equally notable for something else. I'd prefer a weaker wording, or better still, one rates to areas of notability, as above, and not raw numbers of tags. If people find more than one or two inlined images and template messages excessive, it might be worth considering the use of a "silently stub-categorise" template for the equally applicable additional tags, though that's complicating matters somewhat. And surely the object isn't to make stubs visually acceptable anyway, it's to make them non-stubs! Alai 05:44, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

As you put it, "it's to make them non-stubs!" In the case that you give, of the American sports journalist, it much more likely that it will be sports fans that will improve the article, so in my opinion only a {{Sportbio-stub}} is necessary. In many other cases, there are now appropriate combo stubs so that, for example, a Japanese writer no longer needs both a Japanese stub and a writer stub, but instead gets a {{Japan-writer-stub}}. Every case where I've seen three stubs it's been overkill and at least one of the stubs was was so general or so loosely connected to the article that it wasn't needed. If you really think that a third category might be appropriate, it is easy enough to add just the category without the stub template by hand. BlankVerse 11:05, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
This isn't always clear; indeed, I'm not sure it's even clear in my example instance. An Argentinian soccer fan isn't very likely to be be interested in writers on US baseball, say, so what's to say the general sportsbio cat is more likely to lead to expansion than a USA-specific one? (Even within the same sport this may be often true, though writers aren't even necessarily going to be so particular.) I certainly don't see how that would rise to being "so general or so loosely connected to the article". Making it a judgement call as to which one or two is the "most important" is just going to lead to needless confusion, and to arbitrary omission from entirely applicable categories. Obviously where there's a "combo stub" there's no problem. Adding by hand is possible, but not actually quite so easy to do, since even if one knows the stub template off the top of one's head, the text of the category may be less evident. Alai 02:00, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
AFAIC the more stub templates on an article the better, since it increases the chance that appropriate editors will see and expand an article. In any case, it's often impossible to accurately put an article into one - or even two - neat little pigeon-hole(s). If a mountain is at the point that three countries meet, what are you going to do? Ignore one country? Or just use "geo-stub" and hope that an editor will stumble across it by accident? If someone was a politician and novelist and came from a small country that doesn't have its own politician-stub or writer-stub then do you ignore the country-stub? No - you triple stub. I'll 'fess up - I put that "strongly discouraged" line there - it used to read "not permitted", which went against normal stubbing practice. But as the number of available stub types has increased, so the ability to use several far finer descriptions of an article has improved, and more stubs are now more the norm. Perhaps if we bump it up one and say that four stubs in strongly discouraged, it would better reflect current practice. Grutness...wha? 07:04, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] -related

This page and things it links to refer to "-related" categories, i.e. France-related.. apparently this is against current guidelines. Can the examples be improved? Thanks Srl 22:33, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I fixed France-related. OK to remove road-related? any reason to keep it? Srl 22:57, 6 December 2005 (UTC)


[edit] How does this work?

Hi every body, i'm new here and just wanted to ask if there was a manual or something for writing, and also have a few ideas for the site.

Thank you.

Adham

Hi there Adham. I have added a welcome messages to your talk page that has some useful links. You might also want to have a look through Wikipedia:Your first article. --TheParanoidOne 19:39, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Addition of "cite your sources"

Jengod (talk • contribs) has been adding "and citing the source of your information." to a number of stub templates, such as insect-stub and others. Does this seem necessary? It seems to just make the stub notice longer than needed, by adding redundant instructions. --TheParanoidOne 12:59, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

As far as I know, it has not been discussed on stubsorting or anywhere else. Now, the same bloody line is added twice or three times whenever an article is double-stubbed. That looks very much like vandalism to me. It should be removed at once. --Valentinian 14:28, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
I agree they should be removed, stub notices are not the place to nag people for sources since the same thing applies equally to any substantive edit. Kappa 14:40, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
Yes, but if we suddenly expect every featured article candidate to have a full slate of citations and hope the same thing for every article on down, I think it's only fair that we alert people from the get-go. And truth be told, I think Wikipedia has enough momentum that we no longer have gently grovel for edits. Ideally everything that goes into the 'pedia in the post-Siegenthaler era should be verifiable. I know it's not going to happen—this is a vernacular, populist document—but we simply have to push that way if we are to protect ourselves and/or be taken seriously. Also, it's soooo much easier to cite things as you go along, rather than go back and cite later, and going forward, we really, really ought to encourage it. jengod 18:04, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
First of all, couldn't you have discussed this with the stub sorting community beforehand? If citing sources is important to the Wikipedia, then what about consensus? I think it is at least twice as important! Second, I find it rather unlikely that this short sentence at the end of every stub tag will make any difference. People already know that they have to cite, they just either forget or do not have the time/patience to do it. If this was a formal vote of any kind, I'd vote for the sentence to be removed. --Sn0wflake 18:14, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
I was being bold. Of course you should do whatever you want with your usual stub notices and I'm sorry I didn't seek consensus beforehand. I'll go back tonight and revert all my changes. jengod 18:19, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
Note that MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning appears underneath the text box every time you hit the "edit" link and it contains the Wikipedia:Verifiability link that you have added to the stub templates. --TheParanoidOne 18:27, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
I kind of think repetition isn't a sin when you're trying to get a message across, but never mind. Anyway, I think I got them all, let me know if I missed any. jengod 18:49, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

No offence to jengod, but - as one of those heavily involved in stub sorting - I don't think it's a particularly good idea for a number of reasons: 1) there are already specific templates for this sort of thing; 2) a lot of stubs are sourced and externally linked; 3) changing heavily used templates makes for server trouble. Also, it would have been nice if WP:WSS had been at least told of what was going to happen. Of these points, the most important is the second one. Why indiscriminately add a "cite your sources" message to all stubs when a lot of them ARE cited? Grutness...wha? 23:34, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Stubs obsoleted in German Wikipedia

Maybe some food for thought... As of December 28, 2005, the German Wikipedia community has decided to get rid of all stub categories (see de:Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/Stubs). The poll ended 106:68 in favor of "killing" the stub categories. The reason given was that stub categories have proven to be simply not working out and do not make sense at all regarding srticle quality. --Pmkpmk 17:01, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Stub categories in the German Wikipedia came and went very fast. I remember that by the time we were rewriting the Stub policy (mid-2005), they were starting to implement the first stub categories. So that means they didn't notice an enormous change in a short timeframe and deemed the proccess useless. Sound more like imediatism than good sense to me. --Sn0wflake 20:54, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The color of stubs

I think we need to change to the colour of stubs. Blank articles are red, full articles are blue, stubs should be yellow or brown or something; featured articles can be in somekind of elite green color. what do you think? Col Our 12:20, 15 January 2006 (UTC-5)

You can already do something like this with the Misc preference "Threshold for stub display". I find 800 is a good number to set it to to highlight obviously short articles. It colours based on article size, not whether they are tagged as stubs, but it's close. --Scott Davis Talk 03:51, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

I am not a member, to set perference I have to be a member. I think wikipedia should be for the general public. I really think some stubs should have different color. If I clicked on a stub and it doesn't tell me much; I wouldn't have clicked on in the first place. I'll just research it on google (though I'll be sure to add infomation to the stub from 'google' if I have the time or feel like it.)As for the coloring of featured articles a different colour, I would be more inclined to click on featured articles links in an article, if I knew it was a feature article (and vis versa for stubs). Different colours would allow readers and editors to better know which ones to avoid, work on or click on. Doesn't registering take up valuable wikipedia memory room? I also think wikeypeedia should have a spell check for the search, spell checking something via google takes time and should be unnecessary. (I am sure we could copy the gramma check from microsoft word without infringing copyright laws, hehe, if it does we could just ask Bill) Col Our 10:27, 16 January 2006 (UTC-5)

If you have a username you are a member. But I agree that member's only systems are often inadequate as a huge majority of members are not registered. But I think that having three colours of text is distracting enough as it is, so I don;t support a change in this case. Carina22 22:11, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Usefulness of multiple stub tags

I have a few times added quality markers to articles, but was reverted with the message that material intended for editors, such as notes of the article being a Featured Article, should only be put on the talk page.

However, with stub-tags the situation is obviously a different one. Perhaps it is just the status quo that makes it eligible to put three or four stub-tags on an article? In an article such as Adolf Fredrikskyrkan, I question whether all the stub tags are indeed useful for the reader.

Fred-Chess 13:08, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Three or four stub tags on an article is definitely not good for the reader. It's very irritating- enough that some people tend to go on sprees of simply removing all but one from the article, which is unfortunate, as then they lose categorization. I think it should be set as a rule that an article should only ever have one visible stub template, with any other applicable types as categories only. -- Jake 21:26, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Multiple stub tags are useful for readers because they help editors to find articles and improve them. They only show up at the bottom of articles, so they aren't getting in the way of anything. Kappa 21:36, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
How does it help editors find the articles more easily than the category alone? And a fairly large number of people have commented that they find numerous stub tags very irritating and visually unappealing. What benefit does the second, third, or fourth tag give over just adding categories for those? -- Jake 21:43, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
I'm not sure it's good practice to add stub categories without the corresponding stub template, as it adds to maintenance, and increases the chances that the category might be left in place accidentally even after the article itself is destubbed. I don't think we should mix manual and automatic (via template) category population. – Seancdaug 04:16, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
That definitely is a problem; I have run across articles that had stub categories added directly that shouldn't have been there anymore. Maybe if there was some way of doing {{bio-stub|hide}} for ones after the second or so, such that it added the article to the category but didn't display anything? --Mairi 04:27, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
That'd be a good fix, it is (or if it were to become) technically feasible. In theory this would keep everyone happy (he said, hedging through long experience of disappointment of such expectations), as it'd prevent both "under-categorisation" and "over-tagging". I hadn't thought of making it a template parameter, that's worth a go -- though of course it'd then mean recoding every existing stub template... Alai 04:42, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
Ok, I got it to work with {{whatever-stub|hidden}} instead (there ought to be some way similar to the if templates (but without using one of them directly) so that the exact text doesn't matter, but I can't figure out how). It's a relatively minor coding change, just adding {{{1|}}}Structure to the class part of the div tag. (See User:Mairi/Demonstration-stub.) Changing every existing template would be a pain, but it'd be doable -- probably by bot. --Mairi 06:08, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
I'm impressed, I didn't know there was a parametric default mechanism in wiki markup. *makes 'we're not worthy' obeisance to Mairi* It seems like an entirely good idea, then. I'd suggest floating the idea as widely, and trialing as gently, as is possible, in anticipation of the next round of flames asserting we're all OCDish/trolls/WP:OWNers, etc, etc. Alai 17:51, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
Don't forget to throw the word cabal in there somewhere. ;) --TheParanoidOne 22:22, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
  • facepalm* My bad on that. Alai 02:38, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
Hey, nice work! If we can get that in the stub templates across the board, that would help a lot. Probably best to put it in metastub first and make sure it gets in any new templates for certain, then apply it to existing templates (might be handy to make sure they're all 100% standardized too while doing so)... would want to run it past the majority of WP:WSS before going ahead with the mass change, of course, but I don't see that as a problem. -- Jake 07:40, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
I'd tentatively support this, although the word "metastub" does make me wonder whether we'll be back to the "don't use metatemplates" row. I'm also a little concerned because you find stub templates on articles in all sorts of unlikely places. It often takes a bit of hunting to find where a stub template is in an article - remove the stub message and it makes it harder still, especially when (in one case I dealt with a couple of days ago), an article was in three different stub categories, with templates in three different places in the article! I have one final nagging question, too - how would we stop people from hiding all the stub templates (which would definitely NOT be desirable)? Is there some way of rigging the parameters to ensure that one template is automatically shown, even if all of them say "hidden"? Grutness...wha? 11:54, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
1. "metastub" I referred to is an existing template used to create a new stub template. It's described in the "Creating the stub template" section of WP:STUB. 2. Except for section-stub, which should never be hidden, stubs should always be at the bottom of the article, after everything except categories and interlanguage links (and the persondata commented section, where it exists). When people put them elsewhere, that's already something being done wrong, no new ruling is needed there. 3. If people add the |hidden parameter to all the stub notices... change one back? It's not feasible to make one template automatically be shown. It might be possible, but complex template work like that is bad for the servers. -- Jake 21:16, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
1, ok, point taken, I misunderstood originally. 2, that doesn't answer the question. At the moment, you can easily tell where the stub templates are because that's where they appear in the text. If they're hidden, it will greatly slow down stub-sorting and removal work for those which are not correctly stubbed (and, from sorting them for a long time, I'd say that's around 20% of stub articles). As to 3, saying "change one back" doesn't help at all. As soon as it becomes obvious that stub templates can be hidden, there is a dedicated group of editors (I'm sure everyone at WSS will be able to name several of them) who will systematically go around deliberately hiding every stub template they can. unless there is some practical way to ensure that one stub template will not be hidden in every multi-stubbed article, then I am pretty firmly against the idea. WSS will have a full-time job in its hands reverting hidden stubs, where it should be busy sorting stubs. Grutness...wha? 02:55, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
I'd be surprised if this were to be a major problem in practice. This is exactly the situation with categories anyway, and I haven't heard many (well, any!) complaints about it being excessively difficult; and stubs being stubs, it's generally not going to be that hard. If all else fails, fire up a browser with a searchable edit box. Suggestions for methods of remonstration with anyone who hides a stub-tag in the middle of a 5,000 word article gratefully accepted. (Or see Mairi's comment below about "unhiding" such stub-tags.) Alai 04:19, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
I've mentioned it on the talk of WP:WSS; it might be worth mentioning it on the Village Pump as it could affect plenty of people. The concerns about stubs being in odd places and preventing people from hiding all stub template are reasonable. I don't know of any good code solution to always show the first template (althought it's possible one exists), other than what Jake said. It'd also be possible for an individual logged-in user to have all [well-formed] stubs always displayed, regardless of whether they're marked hidden or not (see my monobook.css). Similarly, a user could decide to always hide stub templates, if they don't care about them at all (which they could do at present anyway). Mairi 04:53, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
That might be overkill, but one suspects that if you don't, the Usual Suspects will yelp about it. (Come to that, they'll probably yelp anyway.) AFAICS, the issues are:
  • Should we change any stubs, and/or the metastub template, to facilitate making this technically possible in the first place;
  • Should the guidelines be changed to suggest a change in usage of the hidden parameter;
  • Does this then have implication for the 'don't use more than two templates' advice.
The first of these seems relatively harmless to me, and the second two a positively good idea. Alai 22:24, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Incidentally, it would be straightforward to produce some simple stats from the db dumps of "heavily stubbed" articles. Or indeed lists of the offending articles themselves. I don't want to alarm anyone, but we could probably pretty safely start with articles with six stub types (i.e., more than some stub types have articles...). Some of these may be sheer excess (marginal categories applied, or redundant supecats), but equally some might be suitable substrates for hidden stub templates... Alai 06:31, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject links in stub templates

What's the general policy on having links to WikiProjects in stub tags? Carnildo has removed them from a number of stubs, citing what he considers to be inappropriate advertising and claims of article ownership; but since nobody else had ever complained, I'm curious about what the general consensus on such links is. —Kirill Lokshin 21:59, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

I tend to stick to the project tags that are put on talk pages because one article could easily fall under several projects (the same way that it could be listed under several stub types); for example, Wisconsin and Southern Railroad has both {{TrainsWikiProject}} and {{WikiProject Wisconsin}} on the talk page. I've seen others that have three project banners on the talk page. We try to limit the number of stub templates on an article to two, but there is no limit imposed on the talk page banners. Slambo (Speak) 17:45, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
I see nothing wrong with placing a link to a project's article guidelines in a stub template, since that's useful information to someone working to expand an article. Placing a link to the project's main page is another matter: it gives no useful information to the casual editor, while giving the impression of article ownership, or with some wordings, the impression that the WikiProject is more important than Wikipedia as a whole. --Carnildo 08:29, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
What if the article guidelines are on the project's main page? ;-) —Kirill Lokshin 16:58, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
Then link to the appropriate section. --Carnildo 22:16, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
Fair enough. Is there some particular wording you think would be best? —Kirill Lokshin 22:38, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
I can't find any specific examples, but {{MEP-stub}} has a good example of how to provide resources for expanding an article, and {{Colombia-geo-stub}}'s wording would be good if the WikiProject actually had something on their project page. --Carnildo 10:02, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
Thanks! —Kirill Lokshin 14:22, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
You are creating yourt own POV policy against consensus. The intention of linking to wikiproject pages in stubs is to encourage collaboration across a range of related topics. Suddenly deciding this is bad is an opinion you are welcome to share, but who gave you the right to make it policy? Garglebutt / (talk) 02:51, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
I resent Carnildo continuing to remove these links and pointing to the discussion here as proof of consensus, when it is obviously no such thing. I see no harm in the wikiproject links, when the whole stub template itself is a self reference. --Martyman-(talk)
Just a note of agreement with User:Garglebutt and User:Martyman - SoM 02:56, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
All the above is true... I've confronted him and reverted on this before, and he still keeps doing it... plus the fact that the road WP pages have the article specifications on them. If it was external "advertising" I would be against it, but it is internal "advertising" encouraging others to help with the WikiProjects. What is the problem with that? See {{Kentucky-road-stub}} 's history for an example. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 02:59, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I am moving discussion on this issue to Wikipedia:Village pump (policy). Garglebutt / (talk) 05:42, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Can't we all just agree that Wikiprojects can be valuable resources, and that linking to a relevant one is good- but linking to a Wikiproject's guidelines on writing a good article is even better? --maru (talk) contribs 05:35, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] UK Geo-stub emblems

I recently made the mistake of altering emblems on a number of UK geo-stubs, for instance, Template:Berkshire-geo-stub, Template:Dorset-geo-stub, Template:Manchester-geo-stub.

I was informed of the error of my ways at User_talk:Lozleader#Geo-stubs and these are mostly reverted, and the images listed for deletion.

I have since come across the following statement atWikipedia:Stub#Creating_the_stub_template:

"Wikipedia policy is that fair use images are not to be used in any templates and that of course includes stub templates."

As most of the images use the coatofarms copyright tag they are fair use - should they not be taken off the stubs?

(As I have stated before, my own opinion is that the arms of modern local authorities are not appropriate as they are not the "county arms" and are sometimes anchronistic, but I accept the rulings made earlier).

Better to have no images at all?

Lozleader 12:40, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Coding of {{metastub}}

This was earlier today changed to:

<div class="notice metadata" id="stub" style="clear:both;">''This {{{article}}} is a [[Wikipedia:Stub|stub]]. You can [[Wikipedia:Stub|help]] Wikipedia by [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} expanding it]''.</div><includeonly>[[Category:{{{category}}} stubs]]</includeonly>

The noinclude seems to be against what's been decided in the past; I've removed it. Coding of some actual stub templates does seem to be getting more "exotic", though: noinclude is common, and sometimes mini-essays in includeonly -- and lots and lots of "stub template categories", which I've put on CFD (their parent is already gone). The rest I dunno about, but clearly it needs to synch up with the discussion on this page, one way or another. Alai 23:11, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Whatever you decide, {{metastub}}, {{stub}} and the tempate on the project page should be synchronized with each other because all are cited as templates for stub creation.--TheFarix (Talk) 00:47, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What's smaller than a stub but bigger than a bad article idea?

Sounds like a setup for a punchline. I wish I had one! What I'm asking is, WP:STUB states "In general, [a stub] must be long enough to at least define the article's title, which generally means 3 to 10 short sentences." WP:BAI states a bad article idea is "Anything which you cannot be bothered to write one complete sentence about." What then is an article of one or two sentences classified as, or isn't there a formal name for them?

Other things on the project page that aren't stubs but don't seem to be defined are "a short article on a topic of narrow scope" and "An article that can be improved by only a rather knowledgeable editor, or after significant research." What are they? Thanks, Esquizombi 09:23, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

I guess they had been called "substubs," but now there's no name or policy on them...? Wikipedia talk:Substub. Esquizombi 05:04, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
Both of the above are "only" guidelines, of course, so "must" should really be "should". I suppose a one or two sentence article is "shorter than is desirable", but not quite "bad" enough to be formally deprecated. Essentially substubs were removed as there was no separate "action plan" for them; substubhood was never grounds for deletion, etc, and it was counterproductive to have a separate substub category, as it tended to become big enough to require sorting itself, thereby potentially leading to parallel "stub-sorting" and "substub-sorting", double-handling in movement between the two, etc.
The other things are to deal with the case of "small articles on small topics", as opposed to clearly incomplete articles on more substantial ones. I tend to work on the presumption that if an article is of "stub length", but is difficult to significantly expand, it's probably a merger candidate. Alai 18:01, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
I have been accused of writing "Microstubs" when I create articles which I intend to go back and expand greatly. From where I access www it is very tempermental .... Garrie 04:43, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stub identification bot

Does anyone know if there is a bot that can detect (or suggest) that an article is of stub length? I imagine it would be human-assissted in some way. If there is such a bot, a link to it would be helpful.

[edit] Feature request: Random stub

Who/how does one ask to have a Special Page created? It'd be awsome if there was a special page that'd take you to a randomly selected stub. I don't want to crawl through the inordinate amount of interrelated categories to find something to work on. Most users probably have something of value to add to ~20-25% of all stubs, and could just click through the random link generator 4 or 5 times to find one. Mrzaius 16:06, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

The idea sounds pretty good. Village pump (technical) might be a more suitable place to talk baout it, though. --TheParanoidOne 17:16, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Done. Also, submitted to Bugzilla. http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5589 Thanks for the pointer. Mrzaius 21:27, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
You could achieve pretty much the same thing by just browsing the stub list, clicking randomly, then clicking a random article in the category. The other advantage is you can work on stubs in your favourite field. Stevage 22:57, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Actually, the main advantage to a random-stub special page would be that it would bypass the catagorization. Many individual contributors can contribute to many categories. This would also help with uncategorized or miscategorized content. Beyond that, it's just nice to be able to click a link and, bam, be taken to a page you've never seen before. However, unlike with SpecialPages:Random Page, all pages linked to under Random Stub need work. Think of it as a working man's Random Page link. Mrzaius 15:09, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
The Village Pump mention has timed out, but the issue still stands. Any idea how best to take care of this? I'd be happy to help, if it were possible to do this within the wiki rather than having to hack the wikimedia code. MrZaiustalk 21:40, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Many stubs ARE articles

I've made a few changes as I couldn't recognise this as a desciption of reality. There are vast numbers of stubs which are perfectly good articles, often longer than the article on the same article in other encyclopedia and longer than the average article in either Britannica or Wikipedia. "Stub" is effectively a form of expansion request and I think that people are so slow to remove them that the number of them is out of control and the range of articles which carry the tag bears no relation to what the page said when I found it. ReeseM 03:16, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

I was going to post this as a separate question, but it's essentially the same point as the above: In traditional encyclopedias, there are often very short entries. These signify that the subject is of sufficient importance to warrant an article, but just a short one. Translating this to Wiki: wouldn't it more sense not to just label all short articles as Stubs, but only those that manisfestly warrant longer articles, or the community decides warrant longer articles? PaulLev 21:32, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Which Stub?

I recently created an article on Customs racketeering, but am wondering which stub to mark it with. Temporarilly I put the Law and Politics stub on it, but I have a strong feeling thats the wrong stub. Could somebody look over the article and tell me which stub to use? I'd like any responses to be posted on my user page as I often forget where this page is. Thanks! Socom49 16:09, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Double-stubbing rewrite

I've changed the "strongly discouraged" stuff, as per my comments above of many months ago, and basically every discussion I've had on WSS on the topic. Obviously we don't want to encourage the Ambrosius Stub sextuple-stubbing treatment, but surely it's better to advise people what to do (indicate primary notability, and in the case of people and such like, nationality), rather than giving stern admonitions on what not to do. Alai 07:00, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Coding of stub templates

What level of significance attaches to the precise coding of stub templates? Personally I'm happy to do ye olde cut'n'paste of some other stub template and modify as required, but I've been noticing increasing incidence of templates coded entirely differently, for example as tables, with none of the html tag stuff prescribed by this page. Does that ultimately matter, or is this just down to nuances of visual appearance, and preferences thereon? Alai 21:34, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

I think perhaps tables have been used at some point in order to get long text to not wrap under an image being used, which can look a little unpleasant.
Using just a single div:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Using a table with two cells:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
It could of course be argued that a stub notice shouldn't be long enough for wrapping to be an issue ...
Anyway, I think that as long as the outermost div maintains the class="boilerplate" (and possibly id="stub") and visibly they appear the same, then it doesn't matter how the internals are coded. --TheParanoidOne 09:47, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
That does appear to be the rationale. It's hard to guarantee no wrapping, since a large image (or small screen, or large font size) could cause it even where the text isn't "normally" a whole line long. But what if they don't, e.g. like this? I've noticed a number changed in this manner, and they seem to interact strangely with the "normal" kind as regards vertical spacing, other than that I have Not Clue One. Alai 00:24, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I've been using [[Image:YourImageHere.jpg|30px|left]] to make the text line up nicely, viz:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

Not a table, and it doesn't center the image vertically, but very simple, give it a try. ♥ Her Pegship♥ 19:45, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Definition of stub

This article doesn't define what a stub is, when it should be tagged, and when it could be untagged, making it fairly useless. I'd hate to think it was stub also. Gene Ward Smith 20:42, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stub positioning decision

This has been brought up before, but never resolved: We need to come to some consensus on where stub templates should be located, for the sake of consistency. Some articles have stub categories first, others last. Personally, I have an opinion on the matter, but I don't even care — just as long as we can agree on something. ~ Booyabazooka 00:31, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Why does it matter? I rather thought that SPUI was only editing the text to get that "less important" poke in: is there an on-going bunfight about the order? I'd think that this is in theory a MoS matter, as it goes to overall formatting of the whole article, rather than just the stub-tags in isolation. Alai 22:21, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
There is no great stub-location war, but SPUI and I were just at odds on the matter, and I'm hoping we can decide on an answer. ~ Booya Bazooka 22:43, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
They should definitely go last. As stub places are left in place in tens of thousands of perfectly good little articles they are always going to be with us in vast numbers, but they are much less useful to the reader than the "real" categories.

[edit] Stubbing is out of control

Stubbing is completely out of control. Tens of thousands of perfectly good articles are labelled as stubs, whereas so far as I can see the concept was originally intended to apply to articles so inadequate as to be almost useless in their present form. Most of the articles in Encyclopedia Britannica would probably be labelled as stubs in Wikipedia. Does that mean that they should be removed from the next edition? Often you see articles which are in a stub category, but not a "real" category. I think this shows a poor sense of priorities. A vast amount of time must be spent on stubbing, but when there are hundreds of thousands of them clearing them is not a viable project, and there are so many of them (and so many of those aren't really that bad) that they aren't even of much use in identifying articles to work on in a specific field. I would like to suggest that people should stop participating in the stub system and focus their efforts on improving wikipedia in other ways. Golfcam 12:51, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] False dichotomy

Most articles tagged "stub" are very much "real" articles in my opinion. I think the rigid distinction between "stub" and "article" is false. Britannica makes no such distinction. It doesn't say, "Our Macropaedia is an encyclopedia is full of real articles, but the stuff in Micropaedia isn't articles", but most of the Micropaedia articles would rapidly attract "stub" notices if posted in Wikipedia. Frankly, I think that stating that stubs are NOT articles, is offensive to all the people who write perfectly decent short articles, which get stubbed. The guideline says that stubs are usually three to ten short sentences, but vast numbers of them are longer than that, and people are far too slow to remove the tag. We really shouldn't be telling people who have written a good 800 word article that it isn't really an "article" at all, but something of much less value. Golfcam 13:02, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Before or after category?

Should the stub be placed before or after the category? I always place it before the category, but bots often move it and place it after the category. I feel it should be before the category. How should it be? And I think it would be good if there was an unified way that all followed... -- Frap 12:52, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't think many of the "stub regulars" greatly care either way, though apparently some of the stub detractors do, given a couple of the comments earlier on this page (in synopsis, "stubs suck, therefore put them last"). Perhaps ask at Wikipedia:Categorisation, since one might argue it's in effect a special case of the issue of what order to place categories in, in general. Alai 19:55, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
I'd prefer to put categories right before interwiki links. It really doesnt matter where you put categories. It is recomended however to put categories after everything but interwiki links. Any change to categories will be much easier to impliment. --Cat out 15:44, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Question on Apperance of Triple Stubs

Topic says it all, in Siege of Faenza the three stubs make the page ugly. Should they be split, or sectioned off? Thoughts?

Wslack 20:02, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

I would say that the Gemany-related and Italy-related stub notices are not needed. The stub is not about Germany or Italy. It is about a historical battle. -- Donald Albury(Talk) 21:12, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
Agreed, and done. --TheParanoidOne 22:13, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree. Stub-tagging isn't about the beautification of one-line articles, it's about maximising the chances of them being expanded. Battles, strangely enough, often involve two (or more) countries, and thus can very readily be tagged with three stub templates (battle-stub, and a country-stub or country-hist-stub). Had every triple-stubbed battle article been de-tagged in the way that's happened here, we'd now have a single unmanageably large Cat:battle stubs category (or at any rate, splitting it would have been made more troublesome), without further differentiation. While there are obviously many editors with some sort of interesting in editing battle-related articles, I don't think that's the only axis they're likely to be expanded on. Alai 00:06, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

My question was more on asthetics then whether the stub sshould be there. They look unprofessional. What if one stub catagory was visible with a picture, and the otehrs remain only as catagories? Is that possible? --Wslack 00:11, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
I have no objection to that, but I don't think it's likely to become standard practice, as it would be highly inconvenient to implement on a wide scale. I repeat my earlier answer: aethetics, and a pretense at "professionalism" are besides the point, when what we're dealing with is a manifestly incomplete article. If making such articles look ugly encourages people to do something about the missing content, so much the better. Now, having said all that (again)... I did make a proposal here for using existing stub types, but tidying up their appearance somewhat, for such cases. Mind you, a lot of it is caused simply by the use of inappropriately large images in the templates. Alai 05:28, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
I would question most strongly the Germany-history-stub. This was not a battle in a German-Italian war. This was a battle between the Emperor and one of his subject states. The Empire does not equate to Germany. -- Donald Albury(Talk) 11:49, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
Yes, but the {{Germany-hist-stub}} is linked to History of Germany, and at least this article includes the time-span mentioned in this battle-stub. Mind, I don't want to start a discussion about what is Germany (we've had those before), but the pertaining hist-stubs for Germany and Italy wouldn't be wrong in ways of getting attention to the stub. Lectonar 11:57, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lists of stats

Many stubs have lengthy lists of stats for certain athletes and events, but not much else other information. Is this a stub? --Lunar Jesters (talk) 00:47, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

  • IMO, yes: if there's three sentences of article body, and 5K of wikimarkup, stats, filmography, publication list, etc, I'd consider that to be a stub. OTOH, if a given wikiproject has decided that that's a complete article for their purposes (a lot of album articles seem to be that way), or it's evidently scoped to be essentially just a "list article", then it may not be. Alai 01:17, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
    • Thank you very much, I will take these comments into consideration. --Lunar Jesters (talk) 01:21, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Concern over this guideline: Wikipedia:Notability (fiction)

I think Wikipedia:Notability (fiction) guideline is discouraging stubs and now is being used primarily to mass merge/delete stub articles and hence is a violating this (Wikipedia:Stub) policy.

Please see Wikipedia talk:Notability (fiction) for discussion.

--Cat out 11:35, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

This was confusing and not at all helpful

[edit] Stub tag removal

Plot of article size (# words) versus Google hits ██ non-stubs██ stubs
Enlarge
Plot of article size (# words) versus Google hits ██ non-stubs██ stubs

The definition of a stub was changed a couple weeks ago from an article with "3 to 10 short sentences" to something far less definitive. [1] I agree with keeping policies from getting in the way of doing the right thing, but there are times when two editors disagree on whether a stub tag should be removed, but still the article is so large that it may be beyond most people's ideas of the maximum size of a stub. The definition now seems to be:

Even a long article on a complicated topic may be a stub; conversely, a short article on a topic of narrow scope may not be a stub.

If there's disagreement over whether a stub should be removed, is there any firmer criteria that could be used?

One possible rough heuristic might be based on the search engine test. Basically, you calculate the number of words in an article, and divide by number of million google hits for the article. Then you compare that article's ratio to the ratio for related stub and non-stub articles. If the ratio is significantly larger than all other related stubs, and is equal or greater to related non-stubs, then the stub tag should be removed, because it's larger than similar topics (while still taking into account article scope).

W/mghits vary quite a bit across different subjects, of course; we write articles based on how much encyclopedic information there is, not on how popular an article is. So unpopular academic articles get fairly high w/mghits (the stub bicomplex number has 187500 w/mghits), while articles about very popular unacademic topics get lower w/mghits (Shinjuku has 200 w/mghits). Nonetheless, comparing a stub to closely-related articles can give an approximate indication of an upper-limit for stub sizes, as an indication for when to remove a stub tag. Does this seem reasonable? --Interiot 04:53, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

I hate "rewrite everything at once for no real reason" edits like the one you mention, since they hide substantiative and "grammar-worsening" changes in among all the needless rearranging. It should probably just have been reverted at the time, and the editor enjoined to break down the changes into more manageable chunks to more sensibly gauge consensus for them. (Possibly we should still do so: did anything much happen in the meantime aside from the usual vandalism reverts?) I think the "absolute size" test is essentially sound. That's in terms of sentences, as the old text said, not counting raw article length in characters, which can be inflated by lists, tables, and other non-main-body-text markup. I don't aggressively remove stub tags on the basis of their being 11 sentences, but there's a point past which "expand" or "sectstub" would be more appropriate, even if it is a "complicated" topic. (After all, if it's complex but obscure, that could be a recipe for Eternally Stub-Tagged.) Alai 00:47, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

There haven't been any real changes since Wai Wai's changes. I'm fine with reverting to the Aug 7 version, or with clarifying the changes and getting at least minimal support for them. And yes, I'd be happy to see some sort of limit added back in, especially since there's {{sectstub}} and {{expansion}} for more complicated topics. --Interiot 12:45, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Here's the definition of stubs (I simply extracted it from the previous edition):

  1. A stub is an article that is too short to be genuinely useful, but not so short as to be useless. In general, it must be long enough to at least define the article's title, which generally means 3 to 10 short sentences. Note that even a longer article on a complicated topic may be a stub; conversely, a short article on a topic of narrow scope may not be a stub.
  2. A stub is an article so incomplete that an editor who knows little or nothing about the topic could improve its content after a superficial Web search or a few minutes in a reference library. An article that can be improved by only a rather knowledgeable editor, or after significant research, may not be a stub.

My understanding:
There's no clear-cut rule what is regarded as "stub". It is not defined simply by sentences. The indication of 3-10 sentences is just a comment. The original passage itself even says Note that even a longer article on a complicated topic may be a stub; conversely, a short article on a topic of narrow scope may not be a stub.

How about if the passage has 11 sentences but is still too short or incomplete to be useful to a reader? Should we remove the stub?

Quotation from The Chicago Manual of Style which is worth considering:

Wikipedia talk:Stub
 Rules and regulations such as these, in the nature of the case, cannot be endowed with the fixity of rock-ribbed law. They are meant for the average case, and must be applied with a certain degree of elasticity.
Wikipedia talk:Stub

Your suggestion about using search engine as a test is good.

When deciding whether the passage is a stub, search engine would help. You would search for articles which discuss on these topics. then compare between your article and third-party articles, if the article doesn't not cover most basic information which other third-party articles cover, it should be regarded as stub.

It's similar to how one determines notability of a person, organization etc. There's no strict rules but it's still working.

Another question we may consider is if the article has a section stub, should we place a general stub too if the article in general does not cover most basic stuff?—Wai Wai (☎) 09:07, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] On writing subst

Is it obvious to wikipedia users who read this guide what subst means? I did not know, and would have found it very helpful to have had a link to it's page from the following sentence - which is emphasised - in the article:

Please note that stub templates should NEVER be "subst'ed".

I had assumed it meant substituted; and that I should not replace one stub for another, more appropriate, stub. A google search put me right on that, but it may just save others the trouble of searching for it's meaning if it was linked to from the emphasised sentence. What are your thoughts? Fuzzyslob 23:50, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

I've added a link to WP:SUBST. --TheParanoidOne 05:16, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion on stub image sizes

Non-WSS-projectpage-regulars may wish to note that there's a discussion here about whether to try to standardise the sizes of the images on stub templates. Alai 18:44, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Deprecated?

In the section Categorizing Stubs, it says Category: Stubs deprecated, but still receives a few articles periodically Why is that page deprecated? Isn't it being used to display articles with uncategorized stub status?

[edit] short pages

There are a number of necessarily short articles about individual periodicals and the like. For a few there will be a substantial article, either their extremely important historical role, or because of some special feature. For most there will be a brief history of the periodical, and a quick summary of what the publisher says, for those who don't need to try finding it in the publisher's outside link--which usually describes the detail fairly well. These are being marked stib, but there won't be aythung much that will get added, and keeping the marker just distracts attention from the real stubs which need substantial additions.
is there a role for an indicator of some sort, saying something like "this short article is not a stub. But if there's more to add, please add it". DGG 03:46, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fast Food- Historyday

            I need to find iformation on Eric Brault and how fast food changed america.
Have you tried the Wikipedia:Reference desk? This page certainly isn't the best place to ask! Grutness...wha? 22:21, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Percentage of articles

What percentage of wikipedia articles include one of the various stub templates? MrZaiustalk 21:25, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

No-one's really sure and I for one don't know of any quick way to work it out. At a rough guesstimate probably about 30-40%. That sounds bad, but that's the way a wiki encyclopaedia works: articles start small as stubs before getting expanded, so there will always be a very large number of stubs. Grutness...wha? 22:15, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I'd forgotten that User:Dantheox did an analysis about a year ago (here) which suggests about 36%. Which is probably where I'd heard the 30-40% figure originally. Grutness...wha? 12:03, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
As of the 31st Oct db dump, 609,960 articles were marked as stubs. At that point, 1,489,809 pages were mainspace non-redirects, so on that basis, a little under 41%. Alai 20:10, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Semi-protect?

I count 15 cases of vandalism by anons in the last two weeks, going by the page history. Perhaps it's time to protect the page from edits by anons? Grutness...wha? 22:40, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. I'm surprised it isn't already protected. --TheParanoidOne 23:03, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Done. Grutness...wha? 00:26, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikiproject links on stub templates

Can we clarify whether these are a good, or indeed an acceptable, thing? Personally I think they're not, and that this page implies this by saying what a stub template should look like, but apparently the lack of an explicit Thou Shalt Not is sufficient for some people to get "creative" in the template space (which then encourages other wikiprojects to do the same). The stub category page is surely a much better place for such links (eithe rin the form of a WPJ banner, or just a free-text link), as they don't put wikiproject links in the articlespace, it avoids the impression of article "ownership", and there's much less concern as to taking up disproportionate space. Alai 17:15, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

I haven't seen any of these; can you give a quick example? On principle, if I understand what you're saying, yes there should be a Thou Shalt Not Put WP links on Article Pages. Use the talk page, if anything. -- nae'blis 05:07, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
A quick example is {{India-musician-stub}} - not picking on WikiProject India, it's just the first one I thought of. Crystallina 20:38, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, after I replied yesterday I came across another example. I did understand you correctly and I do think it's a bad idea, per Wikipedia:Avoid self-references. Unless all stub templates are manufactured like {{selfref}} to hide themselves, I'd say this is an entirely uncontroversial addition to the guideline (and even if they are, I still think it's a bad idea to include WP links). Give it another 24-48 hours to see if anyone does object; you might also run it by the Village Pump for policy. -- nae'blis 23:23, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
I'd agree. I'd also add that it's perfectly OK to put a project link in the category - and in fact would make more sense to do so, since anyone who is deliberately seeking out stubs to expand on a subject would go to the category - and that's exactly the sort of person that a Wikiproject would appeal to. Grutness...wha? 23:57, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../s/t/u/Wikipedia_talk%7EStub_23cc.html"