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

[MuZemike]

Absolutely agree. There are a lot of articles that are not assessed 
(though, for all intents and purposes, WikiProject assessments are not 
exactly the same as stub-tagging on the actual article page itself) at 
all, as well as a lot of articles that are still stub-tagged and are in 
fact no longer stubs. We need to keep that in mind when assigning a 
number or percentage of stubs on en.wiki, as the numbers will most 
certainly be off.

-MuZemike

On 11/29/2010 1:15 PM, Andrew Gray wrote:
> On 29 November 2010 17:33, Charles Matthews
> <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>  wrote:
>> Stubs and how to handle them seem to be controversial still (or again),
>> which is rather surprising given that we have been going nearly a decade
>> now. I'd like to ask how many articles still are stubs, by some sensible
>> standard?
>
> Currently, 73% of enwp articles have some form of quality assessment.
> 13% have the "infrastructure" for assessment - talkpage templates -
> but no rating as yet; the remaining 14% are entirely unknown to the
> assessment system.
>
> Of the assessed articles, two thirds are rated as stubs.
>
> However, there's a massive great caveat to that: an awful lot of them
> aren't. Based on my experience, I'd say anything from a quarter to a
> half of the "stub" articles are not, by any reasonable definition,
> stubs. It's not uncommon now to see a multiple-paragraph article with
> an infobox, image and external links - lacking in many aspects of its
> coverage, no doubt, but a nontrivial amount of content - labelled as a
> stub.
>
> There's three factors at work here.
>
> a) Redefinition: As our standards grow higher, "stub" gets repurposed
> as a catch-all term for "very low-quality article"
> b) Lag: articles being marked as stubs, then expanding, but the tag
> not being removed (or removed from the talkpage and not from the
> rating template).
> c) Drift: people see the articles marked as stub in a) and b), and
> assume this is what one should be like, so grade accordingly.
>
> Overall, using the traditional definition of "short placeholder
> article providing a basic degree of context", the sort of thing you
> might perhaps find in a concise reference work - I'd say ~50% of our
> articles. I *think* the proportion of stubs created now is less than
> the proportion created in, say, 2006, but I don't have much evidence
> to back that up.
>