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

Wed Dec 21 06:21:38 UTC 2005

On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, David Gerard wrote:

> Geoff Burling wrote:
>
> > (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.
>
Are you serious? To repeat myself, how many stub notices does Wikipedia
need on any given article? This is the silliest idea I've seen proposed
here -- including many I have proposed -- for these & probably many
more reasons:

-- having multiple stubs looks ugly
-- multiple stub notices gives the impression that we don't value the
intelligence of our readers (viz., "Hey, this is a stub, & I'm warning
you that you might not find all of the information you expect here! Hey,
this is a stub, & you might not find all of the information you expect
here! Hey, this is a stub, & you might not find all of the information
you expect here!" Some of us get the message the first time it's said.)
-- just how many people actually look for stubs in their area of interest?
I've seen anecdotal evidence that few people bother to chase down stubs.
(When I am on the hunt for a topic to work on, I'm as just as likely to
look under the more broad categories as under the stubs.)
-- this confuses meta-information (which should be on the Talk page)
with warnings to the reader (which should be on the article page) I
believe this falls under the category of "instruction creep". If an
there is a reason an article needs more than one stub notice, then
shouldn't they go on the talk page?

And last, & perhaps most important:
-- just exactly when was this policy dreamed up, debated, & voted on? I
I believe this is one of those situations where the Wikipedia directive
[[ignore all rules]] applies & AFAIK, this isn't even a rule.

Until reducing multiple stubs becomes a bannible offence, I will
continue to do it, based on my editorial discression. you have been warned.
>
[snip]

>  > 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%!
>
You're right. I went back & checked my log of Wiki-EN mail, & I
misremembered the figure. (I'm amazed, though, at how many people threw
around "90%" when talking about issues.) I sincerely apologize.

Geoff