[Wikipedia-l] Stubs as seeds

Tue Sep 24 13:10:35 UTC 2002

The Wikipedia is a garden, and we are its cultivators. Sometimes
brilliant prose flows readily from one's pen, but many excellent
articles started from the most pathetic of stubs.

What is the purpose of creating, tolerating, and/or deleting a stub?

Do we hate stubs because they are not "real" articles? They pollute our
article count, so we can't claim to have 50,000 or 100,000 articles.
They're embarrassing, because something like '''Herman Melville''' is
the author of ''Moby Dick'' doesn't come up to par.

Do we love stubs because they get the ball rolling? Someone writes a
stub like '''Muggles''' are non-magical people in the [[Harry Potter]]
books, and someone else adds [[Hagrid]]'s first use of the term, and
someone else mentions the infringement suit; and the seed grows into a
tree bearing fruit.

I worry that excessive deletion of stubs is like birds pecking at the
seeds which the farmer had just planted. I also worry about stubs that
never blossom into full flower.

I don't think there is a suitable automatic way to deal with this. There
is no substitute for human judgment, and if Mav and Andre and others are
dedicated enough to devote 5 or 10 hours a week to pruning weeds, I'm
not going to complain about excessive zeal. 

Ed Poor