Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/18/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
We have no need to be strict about notability. Having stray articles that escape some subjective criterion for notability does no great harm. If these stubby articles are so lacking in notability it is unlikely that anyone will look at them anyways.
The main harm they do is maintenance effort. I can tell you from watching the stubs that I've created that even very short stubs seem to require a lot of cleaning and polishing. Someone adds a category. Someone refines the stub tag. Someone else fixes a typo. Someone adds a cleanup tag. Someone fixes another typo. Someone else notices that nothing links to the stub, and adds the orphan tag. Someone else realises I've mistyped the ISBN for my main reference, and adds a tag suggesting that maybe I made it up. Someone else comes past and confirms that the ISBN is rubbish.[1] Someone else figures out what the typo is and updates it. Someone else updates the reference so that it includes the full name of the author and book title.
That seems like a good description of things happening normally. Are you saying that it's harmful for people to be doing normal work. As our subject base gets deeper into more obscure territory we can also expect that the time lag for fixing these things will get longer. The universe is unfolding as it should.
And all this for a 2 sentence article! Now of course *I* would never write a crappy stub about a non-notable subject which would be deleted ([[Claudio Gonzales]] aside...), but others do.
That article doesn't exist so I have no basis for commenting on Mr. Gonzalez' notability. A 2 sentence article is the start of what can become something bigger. One just needs patience in waiting for that to happen
So, bad stubs on bad subjects create work (and the worse the stub, the more work). Therefore we do need some minimimum level of positive value from a stub, or the net value to the project is negative.
But still much less work than arguing about something's notability. There is no way to define a "minimum level of positive value" because it is so subject dependent. Debating what that level would be is far more energy draining than the fixups that you described above.
Ec