From: "Anthony DiPierro" anthonydipierro@hotmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Trigger-happy New Pages patrol To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Message-ID: BAY10-DAV26gjHXwKHv00002ab1@hotmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Absolutely no one here appears to be suggesting that stubs are bad. If we had any deletionists at all who were as hardline as Anthony, Mark Richards or Mr. Knight, then that's probably what they would argue.
Maybe no one here, but there are certainly those who vote to delete articles at least in part because they're stubs. Dpbsmith is one, who said on VfD "In borderline cases I am influenced by the quality, thoroughness, and scholarship behind an article as well as the topic. I would probably vote to keep a good article on this topic. But I vote to delete this one."
For the record, this is a fair presentation of my position.
Also for the record, the topic of the article was "Butterface" and the entire content as I write this is
"A butterface is a female who has a good-looking body but an ugly face. This term was popularized on the Howard Stern Show, and comes from the phrase 'Everything looks good but her face'. The word butterface is considered to be pejorative."
This is an expansion of the original article, which was:
"A butterface is a female who has a good looking body but an ugly face."
I think there are good stubs which should be kept and bad stubs which should be deleted and that this was a borderline stub.
I would have voted "keep" on an article whose entire content "A butterfly is a flying insect, usually with striking colours and patterns on its wings. Butterlies live on pollen and nectar from flowers. The lifecycle of the butterfly has four stages: egg; larvae, known as a caterpillar; pupae/chrysallis; adult butterfly" because I would have judged chances of this caterpillar of an stub growing into a butterfly of an article would be good.
I would have voted "delete" on an article whose entire contents was "Butterbeer: A fictional drink of wizards, from the Harry Potter book series" because I would have judged the changes of this growing into a good full-length article to be slim.
It's not _obvious_ to me at all whether the article on "butterface" should be kept or deleted, but I came down on the side of "delete" and that's how I voted. Since the stub is actually growing it may turn out to be the seed of a good article, in which case my vote will have been a misjudgement.
At the moment, indeed, I'm a whore for good-quality articles and you can get all sorts of things past me on VfD by simply making them reasonably long, reasonably well-written, and reasonably well-researched.
Stubs, even substubs that point out real omissions in coverage are useful and grow. (Although I am darned if I see why it isn't better to request an article than to create a substub). Stubs in areas that have a cadre of people with an interest in the topic are useful and grow. Not all stubs are useful or grow. Just as Wikipedia's customs, practices, and technical mechanism are a way to create an encyclopedia, not an end in itself, a stub is a way to create an article, not an article in itself.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/