Anthony wrote:
On 6/14/07, Todd Allen wrote:
We currently have a -lot- of permastubs on athletes, especially those who played professionally but may not have ever started for anyone. As a rule, these articles tend to be very lightly watched (if at all), and I would imagine vandalism to one could stay for quite some time.
What would anyone think of merging such things into, say, "List of players on the 1999 San Francisco 49ers"? Obviously, we would still have separate articles on Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, but we could then put the third-stringers and such into a place where it would be more watched, less prone to vandalism, and not presented as a full biography of the person.
Besides the fact that it would make the encyclopedia much less useful, I think there's a good chance it'd have the opposite effect on vandalism detection compared to what you say. More edits to a page makes it harder to go through each one, and an article which is 95% correct is harder to detect than one which is 50% correct.
Good point. Effective vandals tend to be subtle about their activities. It was only by chance that I discovered the comment that [[Bat Masterson]] limped because he had been shot in the penis rather than the pelvis. Using fear of vandalism as a basis for deciding what we do with otherwise sane articles puts emphasis on an issue other than why we have a Wikipedia in the first place.
IMO there is a big difference between a "short article" and a "stub". "The community believes that stubs are far from worthless; they are, rather, the first step articles take on their course to becoming complete. In other words, they are short or insufficient of information and require additions to further increase Wikipedia's resourcefulness." - from [[Wikipedia:Stub]], back before people came in and ruined it.
Exactly! A good stub encourages people to add to it. A complete absence minimizes the likelihood that anything will ever be done about the subject. When it comes to athletes one needs to remember that even the third stringers were good enough to make it onto the roster of a major league sports teams.
Ec