On 3/17/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: And up for deletion, as well. -- Jonel

On Mar 17, 2007, at 2:36 PM, Bryan Derksen wrote: Which is, we should note, appalling. The idea that interesting articles that nobody seriously doubts the accuracy of and are in no way inflammatory or going to cause anyone any problems to anybody should be deleted is ridiculous. The bias against "I like it" as an argument remains one of our stupidest positions. That people like an article is a good sign that the article is worth trying to fix, keep up, and get to some sort of acceptable standard. Providing information that people want is our job, folks. -Phil

On Mar 17, 2007, at 6:57 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson wrote: Argument from tradition seems to me difficult with Wikipedia. Encyclopedias, after all, have always been written on paper, by experts. Notability, in that case, was a factor of including only the most important information - after all, if you add an article on chicken hypnotism, you have to remove another article. But see, this is where the argument gets strange - what's "encyclopedic" is a factor of a restriction on paper encyclopedias that we don't have. Since Wikipedia is vastly larger than any paper encyclopedia, we've already clearly abandoned any standard of encyclopedicness that can be derived from an external standard having to do with "what encyclopedias are." The standards thus become very much subjective - we delete articles, essentially, because a lot of people don't like them, and describe this dislike in terms of whether the article is encyclopedic. The useful description is "if we let topics in that it is impossible to write a good article about." But that has nothing to do with notability as such. -Phil

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=World_Club_Champion_Football&… Lol, someone loves internet translators.

On 3/18/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: 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=histo… [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&t… 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.

On 3/18/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: I would agree. I *do* think that it is unfortunate that people spend more effort on classifying a stub than actually helping improve it, but in a volunteer project, people do what makes them happy; stub sorting makes some people happy. I think, Steve, that you're applying a commercial project's logic to a volunteer project. In a commercial project, workers can be reassigned to things that are 'more important'. In a volunteer project, people assign themselves tasks that are 'more interesting', for their personal definition of interesting, naturally. I think it's fallacious to think that if we cut down on stubs, the people that spend all their time doing these little maintenance things would do something 'more useful'. -Matt