[Wikipedia-l] Deletion of /pages/ with No Content

[The Cunctator]

"Ray Saintonge" <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> The Cunctator wrote:
> >I know that when you say "useless" you mean "not helping the stated
> >purpose of the Wikipedia project".
> >
> Surely, if we were to adopt a policy to delete "useless" pages, we would
> need an understanding of what we mean by "useless"..  To me it adds
> absolutely nothing to the user's knowledge.  If the article [Tucson,
> Arizona] says only, "Tucson is a city in Arizona" it only states what
> the user had to know to be able to look up the city in the first place.
>  Even the concept "city" is implied by Wikipedia naming conventions.
>  Simply changing the content to "Tucson is a city in 'southern'
> Arizona." could put the uselessness in doubt because the word "southern"
> provides an additional fact.

I absolutely agree. By the way, time and time again stubs have shown to be
excellent spurs for more complete entries. And since the definition of a
stub
is a matter of subjectivity, I recommend that we err on the side of
forgiveness.
And if a stub were to appear at the top of Google, that would be because it
was the most popular resource on that subject. So that hypothetical stub
would
be of use.

Rather than fearing more eyes seeing stubs, I think that should make us
happy.
The more eyes viewing an imperfect article, the more likely that it will be
improved.

Again, every single time there has a been a stub so egregious as to upset
people,
it's been edited extravagantly near instantaneously. If you look at
[[Wikipedia: Find or fix a stub]], you'll find very few super-stubs (of the
form
"Tucson is a city in Arizona"). Usually they're just interesting topics that
only
have a moderate amount of information. (By the way, [[information
technology]]
needs work.)