Fred Bauder wrote:
Precisely the point. An aggressive campaign against
stubs and a policy
which results not only in deletion but them being irrecoverable is not
that. Stubs are not only a bit of information, but a seed planted, a part
of the more general structure of knowledge.
If you'd bother to read what we write, you'd see that we are NOT
campaigning against stubs. I repeat: we are not campaigning against
stubs. In my vocabulary, with the current context, a stub is something
that is not the real thing, but that does perform some part of what the
real thing is expected to do (in analogy with, for example, developing
software). For an encyclopedia article, that means that a stub performs
some of the required functionality (explaining some term) but not fully.
In a sense, almost all Wikipedia articles are stubs, as they do not tell
everything there is to be told about a certain topic. However, in normal
usage, stubs are those articles that merely contain a short definition;
but it is still an article. The pages that we are talking about here are
not stubs. They're less than that.