[WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?

[Charles Matthews]

On 02/12/2010 07:24, Peter Jacobi wrote:
> Charles, All,
>> Are we glad to have five new substantial articles, or embarrassed to
>> have persistent five stubs? So has this made things proportionately
>> better or worse? Discuss.
> Short stale articles at least openly announce that they are in
> a rather preliminary stage. So I'm not bothered at all about
> the five persistent stubs.
>
> Whereas any or all of the expanded articles may turn into
> one of the many long stale articles we have. Outdated, not
> conforming to minimal standards, POV -- (seemingly) forever
> lurking in the depths of our encyclopedia as no active editor
> or WikiProject can be bothered to care for them.
>
Funny you should mention that: I've been working on enWP on the article 
about Naturphilosophie, which is a classic example of an adaptation of 
an Encyclopedia Britannica article that really ought to be quite 
unacceptable now.

Because of other recent matters (thread at [[Wikipedia talk:WikiProject 
Biography#Wikipedia:WikiProject Dictionary of National Biography]]) it 
is certainly of interest to me that there might be "deprecated" ways to 
expand a stub. This bears further discussion, I think. There are a few 
models:

*Stub remains for a few years, not much changed, then someone does a bit 
of research and doubles the number of paragraphs, at least.

I think this is the most traditional model. In the old days you'd have 
stopped calling this a stub. These days it might be labelled "Start 
class" on the Talk page, the kind of reaction the someone in question 
might think warranted a "thanks for nothing".

*Stub beefed up to a lengthy piece using public domain material.

This is what now seems more controversial than it used to be. I have put 
the argument that knowing enough facts and names probably allows you to 
use a search engine better. Add stuff that gives you an outline at least.

*Someone takes up a stub with a particular quality goal in mind.

This was the model used for [[Hoxne Hoard]], the article chosen for the 
British Museum editing day this summer. My own view is more eventualist, 
as usual: articles can be boosted up the quality scale in several 
stages, without saying that being in the top 0.03% (GA level that is) on 
the site is the only worthwhile outcome.

If you think about the phenomenon of "neglect" that Peter points to, 
which is real enough especially in the humanities, I feel it's clear 
that the first two methods have something to offer. If a whole area 
seems moribund, you probably want to work on dozens of articles to make 
some clear improvements first. I would have thought judging people only 
by FA work or comparable is less helpful if that's the problem that 
really needs tackling.

Charles