Ok, I agree that "deletion" is not really what we want to do. But somehow we want to separate these stubs from the good stuff. Lots of proposals have been made on how to do this - I suggest we actually implement one.
For example, we could hide stubs from the "outside world" and only have them appear when a user tries to create an article on the topic. Or we could just implement a change in wording: "There is no article on this topic. However there is a stub, which we invite you to expand if possible."
Please don't think I'm knocking our content. If out of a million articles we have half a million useful ones, we're doing very well. But we do a disservice to ourselves if we claim publicly to have a million articles.
Hmm.
Steve
On 1/31/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/30/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Anyway, the vastness of crap on Wikipedia
In order to test the truth of the above assertion, I pressed "random article" ten times and wrote about what I saw.
The results were as I expected. Out of ten articles, not one that I would be completely happy about deleting. They could all use improvement, some more than others. I contend that the phrase "the vastness of crap on Wikipedia" is extremely misleading. We have a quality product and the world is beating a path to our door to sample it. Enough breastbeating! We should be proud.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTrain_JFK
Rather nice article about a rapid transit system in Queens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claycomo%2C_Missouri
Article about a small village in Missouri. Extensive use of census information
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Skorton
Biography of the President of the University of Iowa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatayu
Disambiguation page. Leads to two good short articles and one single-sentence stub. I added an appropriate stub template to the stub.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/544
A historical link page about the year 544 AD. Sadly it is lacking in any information about what was happening outside Europe and the Northern Mediterranean area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis_Pattern
A well written and compendiuous article about a feature of the Japanese cartoon series: Transformers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narail_District
A stub about a district of Bangladesh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Clemens
A brief biographical article about a professional basketball player who retired in 1976.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Naples
It does what it says on the tin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksmusik
An article about a German folk music form. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l