On 6/11/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
What about the people who WANT to fix articles like that like the person who started this thread. We have cleanup processes. No one asked if someone wanted to fix it. They just played the numbers game. It's not the amount of Google hits that count.
Well, actually the number of Google hits is going to favor current officeholders with articles, as a rule, simply because anyone referring to the office is going to drop their name.
It's interesting to look at this list of past presidents and chancellors of the University of Maryland:
http://www.president.umd.edu/pastpres/
... because for the most part the bios supplied there are very short. There are only three of any significant length. The bio for Mote, the current president, is long, but that's because he's the current president. Wikipedia has no significant biography on any of these except, of course, Mote. I presume some completionist undergraduate at UMCP will eventually stub out the rest, but more likely than not they'll stay that way forever because there simply isn't any other information to be had. And I dunno, if those article show up for AfD a bunch of people are going to say that all university presidents are notable as such, and if anyone goes to the UMCP website and sees that there's no information on them, and says so, someone else will tell them to go look elsewhere. But it's unlikely anyone will look elsewhere. And the clutter problem is already there because one Charles BIshop was president in the early 1970s. Since someone linked every name, he has an article, only it's for the wrong person. I'm not going to make a stub for him, because I don't think he's notable; and if I go and delink the names in the list, I'm sure someone is going to hit we with an inclusionist/eventualist complaint.
But anyway, the answer to the rhetorical question is: if the article gets deleted, and you find good info on it and want to write it, then write it. But write something that at least says enough that people don't wonder why it's there in the first place. You don't need a stub to write an article.