Phroziac wrote:
"They're halfway decent stubs, but we really don't need a lot of one line articles, and we probably really didn't loose anything by deleting them."
We probably should not be speedying "halfway decent stubs". Speedy deletion is supposedly for complete junk, stuff that cannot be salvaged by editing because it shouldn't be on Wikipedia in the first place. Thanks for undeleting the Alberta lake one.
Actually on "one-line articles", my preference is for articles (or at least article intros) that can fit into the first screen. This is an internet encyclopedia and if you can't say something useful in the first paragraph then the reader will wander off to another site. If an article can be written well as a single sentence, I think that's a good thing--indeed an ideal to aim for.
My tongue is only half-way inside my cheek. I think there's the germ of a good idea here, that has been lost in the quest for "featured articles", which in my opinion are often unsuited to the format. For instance today's front page contains an article about the Krag-Petersson repeating rifle which doesn't manage to give any dates at all until the second paragraph (and then only the date of adoption by the Norwegian Navy), although the most significant thing about the rifle is that it was "the first repeating rifle adopted by the armed forces of Norway" How did the editors manage to miss the date out of the first sentence? How did it pass FA in that state?
On 9/15/05, Tony Sidaway minorityreport@bluebottle.com wrote:
Phroziac wrote:
"They're halfway decent stubs, but we really don't need a lot of one line articles, and we probably really didn't loose anything by deleting them."
We probably should not be speedying "halfway decent stubs". Speedy deletion is supposedly for complete junk, stuff that cannot be salvaged by editing because it shouldn't be on Wikipedia in the first place. Thanks for undeleting the Alberta lake one.
The very thought of speedying a halfway decent stub strikes me as both a very bad idea, and very dangerous to the encyclopaedia. How many featured articles started out as stubs?
On 9/16/05, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
The very thought of speedying a halfway decent stub strikes me as both a very bad idea, and very dangerous to the encyclopaedia. How many featured articles started out as stubs?
dunno how many stubs are still a stub a year latter? In practice from what I have seen of how artilcles I appear on wikipedia I suspecy not many featured articles started as stubs.
On 9/16/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
dunno how many stubs are still a stub a year latter?
The Warsaw radio mast took about nine months to grow beyond three paragraphs. It's now one of our more impressive articles, in my opinion.
In practice from
what I have seen of how artilcles I appear on wikipedia I suspecy not many featured articles started as stubs.
Graffiti started out as a rather sketchy little thing. It sat around four months before getting its second edit, and after twelve months it showed scarcely any improvement. It was accepted for Featured Article status early this year, more than three years after the first edit.
Technetium also started out as a feeble thing. No references, just a mercifully brief stream-of-consciousness braindump. It was accepted for FAC in May.
And this is my all-time favorite stub:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commodore_64&oldid=244909 "A home computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_computers of the 1980shttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s. It used a 8 bit 6502 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technologies_6502microprocessor and had 64 *kilo*bytes of RAM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM. The programs used at that time may be still run on an emulatorhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator." -2 December 2001
Accepted for Featured Article Status 22 June 2005
Today:
On 9/16/05, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
The very thought of speedying a halfway decent stub strikes me as both a very bad idea, and very dangerous to the encyclopaedia. How many featured articles started out as stubs?
While I agree, you *did* see the size of those stubs, right? Two more sentences and I doubt they would have been speedied. Probably put on afd though. We really should encourage adding more information in one edit.
On 9/16/05, Phroziac phroziac@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/16/05, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
The very thought of speedying a halfway decent stub strikes me as both a very bad idea, and very dangerous to the encyclopaedia. How many featured articles started out as stubs?
While I agree, you *did* see the size of those stubs, right? Two more sentences and I doubt they would have been speedied. Probably put on afd though. We really should encourage adding more information in one edit.
Indeed, those articles were stubs as they contained more than just one tiny sentence. We should indeed encourage more than one-sentence edits to start articles. One sentence is not a stub but a substub.
On 9/16/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
One sentence is not a stub but a substub.
I'll have to politely disagree with you there. The thing that makes a stub useful is the informational content, not how many full stops it contains.
"John Lennon (1940-1980), a Liverpool-born songwriter, singer and guitarist, and sometime political campaigner, with Paul McCartney formed the core songwriting team of The Beatles and later achieved considerable success as a solo artist."
It's far from telling you everything there is to know about John Lennon--for instance it misses out the assassination because this would overload the stub and focus overmuch attention on the manner of Lennon's death. It tells you nothing of his checkered personal life or the creative hiatus of the late seventies. But I contend that it's a useful stub.
Actually looking at the current overblown version of the John Lennon article, with its stilted "leading [rock music] towards more serious and political messages" and overambitious classification of Lennon as an "artist, actor and author", I think I prefer the stub. A biography must not be left solely to the fans! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing
"John Lennon (1940-1980), a Liverpool-born songwriter, singer and guitarist, and sometime political campaigner, with Paul McCartney formed the core songwriting team of The Beatles and later achieved considerable success as a solo artist."
It's far from telling you everything there is to know about John Lennon--for instance it misses out the assassination because this would overload the stub and focus overmuch attention on the manner of Lennon's death. It tells you nothing of his checkered personal life or the creative hiatus of the late seventies. But I contend that it's a useful stub.
Actually looking at the current overblown version of the John Lennon article, with its stilted "leading [rock music] towards more serious and political messages" and overambitious classification of Lennon as an "artist, actor and author", I think I prefer the stub. A biography must not be left solely to the fans! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Okay, let me rephrase: "One 5 or 6 word sentence or sentence fragment is a substub. I should've focussed on the length of the sentence as short ones tend to not contain enough info, if info at all. One sentence with numerous well-placed commas and clauses is of course quite valid.
Tony Sidaway wrote: <snip>
For instance today's front page contains an article about the Krag-Petersson repeating rifle which doesn't manage to give any dates at all until the second paragraph (and then only the date of adoption by the Norwegian Navy), although the most significant thing about the rifle is that it was "the first repeating rifle adopted by the armed forces of Norway" How did the editors manage to miss the date out of the first sentence? How did it pass FA in that state?
Vote stacking on IRC.
/me runs
On 16/09/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
<snip> > For instance today's front page contains an article about the > Krag-Petersson repeating rifle which doesn't manage to give any dates > at all until the second paragraph (and then only the date of adoption > by the Norwegian Navy), although the most significant thing about the > rifle is that it was "the first repeating rifle adopted by the armed > forces of Norway" How did the editors manage to miss the date out of > the first sentence? How did it pass FA in that state? >
Vote stacking on IRC.
/me runs
I've read some "featured articles" and wondered how on earth they got that status... Probably because our "peer review" rarely really is "peer" review, more often other-editors-who-don't-know-the-subject-having-a-glance-and-thinking-that-looks-nice review.
Not a complaint, just an observation :-)
Dan
At 03:00 PM 9/18/2005, Dan Grey wrote:
I've read some "featured articles" and wondered how on earth they got that status... Probably because our "peer review" rarely really is "peer" review, more often other-editors-who-don't-know-the-subject-having-a-glance-and-thinking-that-looks-nice review.
Not a complaint, just an observation :-)
I have been wondering about pictures in featured articles... there seems to be a rule that a featured article needs to have lots of pictures. The problem is that for many topics there are no suitable pictures.
An example of what I'm thinking of: [[Attila the Hun]] has a whole bunch of pictures of Attila -- but all of them are fictional. To the credit of the article, it is actually mentioned that there are no real pictures of him. But this is way at the end, and the first fictional picture is at the very beginning of the article. Unexperienced readers that don't read all the way to the end might be misled into accepting these pictures as factual representations.
Shouldn't the same encyclopedic standards we have for text be applied to images, too?
Chris [[User:Chl]]
"Chris Lüer" chris@zandria.net wrote in message news:6.2.3.4.2.20050919093012.03d15dd8@mail.zandria.net... [snip]
An example of what I'm thinking of: [[Attila the Hun]] has a whole bunch of pictures of Attila -- but all of them are fictional. To the credit of the article, it is actually mentioned that there are no real pictures of him. But this is way at the end, and the first fictional picture is at the very beginning of the article. Unexperienced readers that don't read all the way to the end might be misled into accepting these pictures as factual representations.
Proper captions should help: does the caption for that picture not give proper attribution? {{sofixit}}
Shouldn't the same encyclopedic standards we have for text be applied to images, too?
Yes.
If there's no real images of Atilla, I don't see any problem with using an artist's representation. That has nothing to do with encyclopedic standards.
--Mgm