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

[Charles Matthews]

On 30/11/2010 11:20, Carcharoth wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 11:11 AM, Ray Saintonge<saintonge at telus.net>  wrote:
>
>> All articles start as stubs, and grow over time.  This does not happen
>> evenly, but there is no need for some to whine about it.
> I think the point being made was that some information is more suited
> to publications like atlases and gazeteers, rather than an
> encyclopedia, and that trying to repackage the information as an
> article might have been a mistake.
There seem to be a couple of points here.

Firstly, it is not true that all articles start as stubs in a literal 
sense; there is plenty of drafting in userspace that goes on. That's not 
something I'd discourage, though it can be taken to extremes.

Secondly, the big areas (which are biography and geography) could be 
handled differently at least at the sub-stub level. I keep hearing 
something about all this, but one can imagine a "box namespace" in which 
there were just infobox-like entities, and those could be transcluded 
when an article was actually written. (Pandora's boxes these: if you do 
it for documented places, why not for documented books, chemical 
compounds, works of art ...). It would be much easier to set up wizards 
for people to create such boxed-up things.

And then you lose the idea that this is hypertext encyclopedia, and end 
up with the story Borges never wrote about logical atomism. I know, I 
know ... I believe WP should continue to play to its strengths, and if 
for example there is Rambot text around do standard cleanuppy things 
about it rather than throwing up hands and saying it will never do. The 
journey has been pretty interesting so far.

Charles