G'day Charles,

Steve Bennett wrote:

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On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 5:06 AM, Andrew Gray wrote:

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I have, interestingly, been noticing it moving in exactly the opposite

direction; articles with a couple of paragraphs of text, a reference

...

or two, an image or an infobox, being marked as "stubs". There's standards inflation at both ends of the rating system...

IMHO, this kind of thing is one of Wikipedia's greatest failings. We still can't even agree on a definition of things like "stub", and it seems to be in everyone's interest not to. People like stuff like that being subjective.

(FWIW, I think it's reasonable to have "stub" be relative to the expected content. Two paragraphs on a country would clearly be a "stub". Two paragraphs on an obscure medieval scribe might be the most comprehensive resource possible.)

The stub business goes back almost forever, though. And the affection for grey areas is not the dominant trend: there are people who seem to have the MoS and its pickier points as bedtime reading. There has always been an adequate definition of stub, which relates to the idea that the article as stands has serious missing information, so is incomplete in an essential way. So Steve's FWIW is correct (no, I haven't looked up to see whether some genius has changed the definition of stub). I've never taken much notice of what is and isn't denominated a stub.

In fact (and to return to the original topic ;)), I would argue that Steve's comprehensive two-paragraph article on an obscure-but-important mediaeval scribe could even be considered a Featured Article, if it was Pure Awesome in all other respects.

But, thanks to feature creep ...

* '''Oppose''', too short ~~~~