I hope this thing works better. Apologies for the change of email address.
On 9/15/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/15/05, Tony Sidaway minorityreport@bluebottle.com wrote:
geni writes: It isn't going to happen. Moreover it seems to run against the wiki philosophy. Article creation is *supposed* to be cooperative. If an editor comes along and decides something needs merging, he should do it. He can hardly do it if someone speedies it in the meantime!
perhaps but we have ask if the person is better off working from a null base or this stuff.
Oh give me a stub any day. It performs three useful functions: firstly it provides information to readers, secondly it provides a basis for further research and expansion (or merging) and thirdly it notifies editors of a piece of verifiable information that (probably) belongs somewhere on Wikipedia. If we left the job of thinking up new articles to me, we'd end up with nothing but articles about odd programming languages.
I'd take issue with your designation of the share index article as a
substub. The article was short, but that didn't stop it explaining adequately what the index is and giving an external link as a reference from which it could be extended indefinitely. Thus it cannot possibly be described as a substub.
Did it explain what FTSE meant? did it give any information that could not be figured out from the title?
It did not explain what FTSE meant, but it did adequately describe the index. I must confess that the title looks like gobbledygook to me so subjectively I feel that none of the information can be figured out from the title by the average non-specialist reader.
I've had arguments with geogre over this. He apparently thinks that "The Old Man that the Sea is a book by Ernest Hemingway" would a substub because, being an academic, he thinks everybody knows the book. I take what I think is a more realistic approach: it's a clearly inadequate stub but it does give useful information that someone unfamiliar with American literature would surely not know. I checked this on my family. My wife knows the title and associates it with Hemingway. My children, both in their late teens, had never heard of it and couldn't even hazard a guess about what it might be. To them the information in geogre's "substub" would be incomplete but useful.
I'd hazard a guess that there are many more people in the world who fall into that class of people who haven't a clue about Hemingway's works than is generally realised. An avid reader of British and French novels, I don't believe I even got as far into American literature as Melville until I was in my twenties. This was a shame, but for British readers it is a fact of life that American novels are not as widely appreciated as their literary value would merit. I would say that probably more British people know about, and have read, Salman Rushdie than John Updyke.