On 3/18/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
We have no need to be strict about notability. Having stray articles that escape some subjective criterion for notability does no great harm. If these stubby articles are so lacking in notability it is unlikely that anyone will look at them anyways.
The main harm they do is maintenance effort. I can tell you from watching the stubs that I've created that even very short stubs seem to require a lot of cleaning and polishing. Someone adds a category. Someone refines the stub tag. Someone else fixes a typo. Someone adds a cleanup tag. Someone fixes another typo. Someone else notices that nothing links to the stub, and adds the orphan tag. Someone else realises I've mistyped the ISBN for my main reference, and adds a tag suggesting that maybe I made it up. Someone else comes past and confirms that the ISBN is rubbish.[1] Someone else figures out what the typo is and updates it. Someone else updates the reference so that it includes the full name of the author and book title.
And all this for a 2 sentence article! Now of course *I* would never write a crappy stub about a non-notable subject which would be deleted ([[Claudio Gonzales]] aside...), but others do.
So, bad stubs on bad subjects create work (and the worse the stub, the more work). Therefore we do need some minimimum level of positive value from a stub, or the net value to the project is negative.
Steve [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tumba_%28drum%29&action=histor... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&ta... for an idea of all the minor changes that occur to stubs. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stevage/stubs for an idea of the ratio of stubs that get de-stubbed and those that remain stubs.