I think Daniel's excellent explanation of his vote is a model of how people ought to think about these things, and shows why it is perfectly legitimate that different people will come to different conclusions about particular cases. There's no magic formula here, no simple rules, but rather thoughtfulness and human judgment. This is how it should be.
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
"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/
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