stubification to the max! (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another problem looming forWikipedia?)

Wed Dec 21 12:56:10 UTC 2005

G'day Geoff,

> 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:

<snip reasons />

Perhaps the developers could dream up some way to add the benefits of 
multiple stub templates (multiple categories) but hide the text of all 
but one template?  Or even some new text --- if there's more than one 
template present with the word "stub" in it, only print the categories 
as well as "This multi-category article is a stub ..." or something.  Or 
perhaps that's too difficult.

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

Will you also edit war with the Wikiproject Stub-Sorting people who 
regularly patrol stub categories and will add any templates they deem to 
be "missing" from an article?

Stub templates, as far as I'm concerned, are the domain of WSS.  Not our 
problem.  If I'm willing to go the extra mile and add exact stub 
templates, I will; if I'm not, I'll just put {{stub}} and let them sort 
it out.  If we don't like how stub categorising is handled, the solution 
is to either participate in WSS and argue with *them*, or to simply 
refuse to participate and stick to plain-jane {{stub}}.  It's not to 
deliberately mess around the work they're doing (as you're proposing, 
and SPUI received a block for a while back for doing).

I'm sure there's work elsewhere on Wikipedia of which you're rather proud?

> [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.

It depends how you define "drek".  If "drek" means unsalvagable, then 
I'd agree, no more than 20-30%.  If it means "crap", then (before anon 
users were prevented from creating new articles), I'd say easily 90% of 
new articles created by anons were crap and in need of cleanup, if not 
necessarily nuking from orbit.

Cheers,

-- 
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

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