On 6/29/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
For what value of better? I think it's personal preference. I'm one for describing books on the author's article until it becomes too big, in the first instance, but others prefer lots of tiny stubs.
Good, glad I'm not the only one who finds questions like this tricky. It's hard making articles grow in a balanced way. Imagine an article about a topic which naturally has, say, 5 subtopics. The perfect article would be, let's say, 6000 words - 1000 of intro plus 1000 on each subtopic.
Now, imagine our article is currently a 100 word stub, and someone comes along and adds 1000 words on one of the subtopics. I find this very far from ideal, as it vastly overstates the importance of that subtopic. I would almost be inclined to move that subtopic to its own article while waiting for the main article to grow, then move it back later. Since some parts of Wikipedia grow so slowly, it's not right to always talk about "eventualism" - we should make the articles the "right shape" while waiting.
On the other hand, making a redirect rather than an a stub might give the impression that we could never have an article about that book, or that someone has decided we don't want too much info - which isn't true at all.
How to balance the needs of readers with our need to grow?
Steve