On Feb 22, 2009, at 9:23 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/2/22 Ben Kovitz bkovitz@acm.org:
A one-paragraph article that crisply tells the noteworthy fact or two about its subject can be an excellent article.
If there is only one noteworthy fact about the subject, the article should probably be merged per BLP1E. If there isn't more than a paragraph worth of stuff to say about a subject, you need to think long and hard about whether there should be an article.
Well, I checked and it turns out that two of the articles that I had in mind are (a) longer than one paragraph, and (b) do not have the stub tag on the main page. :) They are, however, rated Stub-Class on their talk pages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_Kent (5 paras) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Nickel (2 paras)
These are the kinds of good short articles that I have in mind, though: they tell what made the person notable, they provide a couple links for further info, and that's it. Expanding them with trivia would obscure the notable facts. "The more you write, the less chance that people will read it."
(Hmm, I'm not sure that the fact in the Laura Nickel article about the Midnight Special Law Collective is really notable. Before it was added, the article really was one paragraph.)
Ben