[WikiEN-l] On speedying "halfway decent stubs"

Thu Sep 15 15:58:47 UTC 2005

Phroziac wrote:

"They're halfway decent stubs, but we really don't need a lot of one
line articles, and we probably really didn't loose anything by
deleting them."

We probably should not be speedying "halfway decent stubs".  Speedy
deletion is supposedly for complete junk, stuff that cannot be salvaged by
editing because it shouldn't be on Wikipedia in the first place.  Thanks
for undeleting the Alberta lake one.

Actually on "one-line articles", my preference is for articles (or at
least article intros) that can fit into the first screen. This is an
internet encyclopedia and if you can't say something useful in the first
paragraph then the reader will wander off to another site.  If an article
can be written well as a single sentence, I think that's a good
thing--indeed an ideal to aim for.

My tongue is only half-way inside my cheek.  I think there's the germ of a
good idea here, that has been lost in the quest for "featured articles",
which in my opinion are often unsuited to the format.  For instance
today's front page contains an article about the Krag-Petersson repeating
rifle which doesn't manage to give any dates at all until the second
paragraph (and then only the date of adoption by the Norwegian Navy),
although the most significant thing about the rifle is that it was "the
first repeating rifle adopted by the armed forces of Norway"  How did the
editors manage to miss the date out of the first sentence?  How did it
pass FA in that state?