On 18/09/2007, InkSplotch inkblot14@gmail.com wrote:
Good evening, gentle folk, Is cruft this bad? Are stub articles choking the encyclopedia? On the flip side, is our good faith really so...short? How long should we give an editor after they create an article to fully source it, establish notability, etc. How long for an admin? And if there is no window of grace in first creating an article, should someone approach the bot makers? Would it make sense to have a bot simply speedy articles under a set number of characters?
Stub articles and cruft seem to be sickening to wikipedians. Perhaps it is infecting the entire encyclopedia, which afterall is rather like a paper encyclopedia to most people, so it can only contain the best of everything and not propose knowledge that hasn't already been written in proper "Manual Of Style" headers with a perfect lead section.
Putting an article through the entire "deletion process" really does waste time. Why not see if you can improve on the article? Instead there are wikipedians (possibly admins) who, figuring there are too many articles which are in dire need of their personal attention to actually put time into just one, will either delete it or slap a tag on it and move on to the next presumably cruft/stub topic.
Production lines don't have intelligence; why should Wikipedia be stuck in that grain too.
Peter