On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, Mark Gallagher wrote:
G'day Geoff,
On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, David Gerard wrote:
Geoff Burling wrote:
(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different parent categories. Someone from a wikiproject about content will often go into that project's stub category and start work on stuff they find there.
Are you serious? To repeat myself, how many stub notices does Wikipedia need on any given article? This is the silliest idea I've seen proposed here -- including many I have proposed -- for these & probably many more reasons:
<snip reasons />
Perhaps the developers could dream up some way to add the benefits of multiple stub templates (multiple categories) but hide the text of all but one template? Or even some new text --- if there's more than one template present with the word "stub" in it, only print the categories as well as "This multi-category article is a stub ..." or something. Or perhaps that's too difficult.
That is something I have often wondered. Some kinds of stubs lend themselves to more than one category -- but were it possible to simply add something like {{subst:stub}} to an article, & send a flag to all of the categories that this article needed attention!
Until reducing multiple stubs becomes a bannible offence, I will continue to do it, based on my editorial discression. you have been warned.
Will you also edit war with the Wikiproject Stub-Sorting people who regularly patrol stub categories and will add any templates they deem to be "missing" from an article?
Naw, I'm too preoccupied with other things to waste time edit-warring. And I have found that the best tactic when faced with this kind of confrontation is to walk away -- then make my changes several months later, after the miscreant has gotten her/himself banned.
Stub templates, as far as I'm concerned, are the domain of WSS. Not our problem. If I'm willing to go the extra mile and add exact stub templates, I will; if I'm not, I'll just put {{stub}} and let them sort it out. If we don't like how stub categorising is handled, the solution is to either participate in WSS and argue with *them*, or to simply refuse to participate and stick to plain-jane {{stub}}. It's not to deliberately mess around the work they're doing (as you're proposing, and SPUI received a block for a while back for doing).
I suspect that most of them aren't too keen on multiple stub templates for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere. Until now, no one's even noticed what I've been doing.
I'm sure there's work elsewhere on Wikipedia of which you're rather proud?
I've been trying to corral a decent sampling of articles for [[Wikipedia:Good articles]]. And I've written a few biographical articles on Ethiopian people. Why do you ask?
[snip]
When I used to do New Article Patrol on a regular basis, I found myself wikifying new articles, rather than tagging them for deletion. (Despite the kill-happy reputation of AfD, I found it far easier to subject these articles to a scrubbing than listing them.) Then I saw David Gerard's comment about 90% of new articles were dreck, & started to suspect my own judgement. So I lost interest in that chore.*
I didn't say 90%, I said 20-30%!
You're right. I went back & checked my log of Wiki-EN mail, & I misremembered the figure. (I'm amazed, though, at how many people threw around "90%" when talking about issues.) I sincerely apologize.
It depends how you define "drek". If "drek" means unsalvagable, then I'd agree, no more than 20-30%. If it means "crap", then (before anon users were prevented from creating new articles), I'd say easily 90% of new articles created by anons were crap and in need of cleanup, if not necessarily nuking from orbit.
By "drek" I meant new articles David described in another email as "shoot-on-sight". People complain that many -- if not most -- of our articles are mediocre: there are times when I feel many articles on notable subjects aren't even _that_ good.
Geoff