2009/2/22 Ben Kovitz bkovitz@acm.org:
IMO, making an article "not a stub" by padding it with trivialities does not make the article better. It clutters Wikipedia and distracts from the genuinely important content. A one-paragraph article that crisply tells the noteworthy fact or two about its subject can be an excellent article.
Is there any controversy about that? Or are those trivial facts getting in not because of stub tags but just because lots of people love to pad?
If there is only one noteworthy fact about the subject, the article should probably be merged per BLP1E. If there isn't more than a paragraph worth of stuff to say about a subject, you need to think long and hard about whether there should be an article. In some cases, there probably should, but I think it most cases such a lack of information is a sign that the article should be deleted or merged.