Category talk:Hurricane stubs

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Hurricanes
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Note this includes typhoons, hurricanes, and all tropical cyclones. Jdorje 18:21, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] What is a stub?

What should a hurricane stub be? Is there any criterion? Is this it?

  • Dates
  • Damage
  • Death toll
  • Storm History
  • Retired/No and replaced by what name
  • Records if any

A stub is typically only a few sentences long, not a couple of paragraphs. Why are some articles like Tropical Storm Odette (2003) a stub which gives a full history of the storm, while other articles shorter than it are not? Articles needing an infobox should not be stubs. Only short summaries of a storm should be a stubs, while "Longer stubs" should be Articles needing an infobox or something like that. Hurricanehink 14:06, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Good question. Wikipedia probably has a global standard for stub articles but I'd say for tropical cyclone articles we can refine it a bit. But I'm not sure what the standard should be. It might include:

  • Articles that needs to be expanded. I sometimes add {{hurricane stub}} if something's less than a page long and has no infobox or picture. Of course there's a separate category for this - {{infobox hurricane needed}}.
  • Anything that need a picture. Of course there's a separate category for this too - Category:Hurricane articles needing a picture.
  • Anything short or non-notable enough that it could simply be merged in with a season article. Hurricanes are a bit different from other articles in that we have per-season articles that summarize each hurricane. Any hurricane that is not noteworthy doesn't need an article and may just be a stub. See Typhoon Odessa for an example of this.
  • Anything that's not notable. Yesterday I added history categories to every single tropical cyclone article. There were less than 5 articles that didn't fit into any category because they were not historically notable. These included Typhoon Odessa, Hurricane Linda, and Hurricane John. However these may still not qualify as stubs; the latter two are pretty long articles and the hurricanes are notable in the sense that they were very unusual (but then so was Hurricane Vince and it doesn't get its own article).

In summary I'm not really sure what the standard for a stub should be. All I can say is that anything that's marked as a stub means that someone thinks it needs to be expanded, and that we always have the option of merging short hurricane articles back into their season categories. As for why the criteria for determining stubs seems to be inconsistent...no sense wasting time worrying about that; it just happens because people add or remove {{hurricane stub}} as they see fit while browsing through articles.

For myself you can see some of the articles I've written that I consider not to be stubs: 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane and 1947 Fort Lauderdale Hurricane. But most people would consider articles even much shorter than these to also not be stubs.

Jdorje 18:21, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

I have a proposal. If an article is longer than an infobox, and it contains all the important information (where and how it formed, where it went, where it hit and how strong), it should not be a stub. Articles shorter an an infobox should be stubs. That way we have a set standard. Sounds good? Hurricanehink 20:02, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, I have no particular objection - but if people add {{hurricane stub}} to an existing article it probably needs expansion even if you don't feel it's a stub. And BTW, it looks like Hurricane Vince wasn't a good example as a storm that doesn't deserve its own article. Jdorje