[WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another problem looming forWikipedia?

Tue Dec 20 08:16:06 UTC 2005

Geoff Burling wrote:

> I'm sometimes amazed at how much work various people are willing to expend
> on categorizing & recategorizing stubs. I can't help think that the effort
> expended on moving an article labelled {{bio-stub}} to (say)
> {{German-bio-stub}}, then {{German-scientist-bio-stub}}, then suplimented
> with tags like {{biologist-stub}} & {{European-woman-stub}}. Having a
> project like this for these kinds of people to expend their need for
> organization would be A Good Thing.

We have one.

> (And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag
> attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn
> the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)

PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different
parent categories. Someone from a wikiproject about content will often
go into that project's stub category and start work on stuff they find
there.

That is: the sort of stub is actually as important as that it's a stub.

 > When I used to do New Article Patrol on a regular basis, I found myself
> wikifying new articles, rather than tagging them for deletion. (Despite
> the kill-happy reputation of AfD, I found it far easier to subject these
> articles to a scrubbing than listing them.) Then I saw David Gerard's
> comment about 90% of new articles were dreck, & started to suspect my own
> judgement. So I lost interest in that chore.*

I didn't say 90%, I said 20-30%!

- d.