geni writes:
"Or we can hope that the person createing substubs (these are not subs) will get a clue and create [[FTSE listings]]."
It isn't going to happen. Moreover it seems to run against the wiki philosophy. Article creation is *supposed* to be cooperative. If an editor comes along and decides something needs merging, he should do it. He can hardly do it if someone speedies it in the meantime!
I'd take issue with your designation of the share index article as a substub. The article was short, but that didn't stop it explaining adequately what the index is and giving an external link as a reference from which it could be extended indefinitely. Thus it cannot possibly be described as a substub.
By the way, I take issue with one or two of the example substubs on the Wikipedia:Substub article. For instance: "Anthony J. Drexel Biddle (1876 - 1948) was the man the play and film The Happiest Millionaire was based upon" is a perfectly good stub. It gives Biddle's full name and his lifespan, and an inkling of where you might have heard that name before (The Happiest Millionnaire is a fictionalized biography and features Biddle under that name). The stub is already useful in itself, and absolutely nothing else would be required for any reasonably competent editor to expand it indefinitely.
Once I had a go a storting out Articles that need to be wikified. by the end of the week I had as far as makeing sure everything starting with the letter A was either wikified of on VFD.
Well yes, but that's because there's only one of you and the Library of Babel is truly vast. If you found any dross in there I hope you tagged it for deletion. If you didn't then the fact that the text wasn't (horrors!) wikified doesn't detract so much from its informational value that this must be viewed as a serious problem. Every article has a search box into which the reader can type anything he wants to know about.
On 9/15/05, Tony Sidaway minorityreport@bluebottle.com wrote:
geni writes: It isn't going to happen. Moreover it seems to run against the wiki philosophy. Article creation is *supposed* to be cooperative. If an editor comes along and decides something needs merging, he should do it. He can hardly do it if someone speedies it in the meantime!
perhaps but we have ask if the person is better off working from a null base or this stuff.
I'd take issue with your designation of the share index article as a substub. The article was short, but that didn't stop it explaining adequately what the index is and giving an external link as a reference from which it could be extended indefinitely. Thus it cannot possibly be described as a substub.
Did it explain what FTSE meant? did it give any information that could not be figured out from the title?
By the way, I take issue with one or two of the example substubs on the Wikipedia:Substub article. For instance: "Anthony J. Drexel Biddle (1876
- was the man the play and film The Happiest Millionaire was based
upon" is a perfectly good stub. It gives Biddle's full name and his lifespan, and an inkling of where you might have heard that name before (The Happiest Millionnaire is a fictionalized biography and features Biddle under that name). The stub is already useful in itself, and absolutely nothing else would be required for any reasonably competent editor to expand it indefinitely.
Is that still around?
Well yes, but that's because there's only one of you and the Library of Babel is truly vast. If you found any dross in there I hope you tagged it for deletion. If you didn't then the fact that the text wasn't (horrors!) wikified doesn't detract so much from its informational value that this must be viewed as a serious problem. Every article has a search box into which the reader can type anything he wants to know about.
nah for the most part if it was dross I just left the other cleanup tags in place ( I still think they should include an element of apology).
I hope this thing works better. Apologies for the change of email address.
On 9/15/05, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/15/05, Tony Sidaway minorityreport@bluebottle.com wrote:
geni writes: It isn't going to happen. Moreover it seems to run against the wiki philosophy. Article creation is *supposed* to be cooperative. If an editor comes along and decides something needs merging, he should do it. He can hardly do it if someone speedies it in the meantime!
perhaps but we have ask if the person is better off working from a null base or this stuff.
Oh give me a stub any day. It performs three useful functions: firstly it provides information to readers, secondly it provides a basis for further research and expansion (or merging) and thirdly it notifies editors of a piece of verifiable information that (probably) belongs somewhere on Wikipedia. If we left the job of thinking up new articles to me, we'd end up with nothing but articles about odd programming languages.
I'd take issue with your designation of the share index article as a
substub. The article was short, but that didn't stop it explaining adequately what the index is and giving an external link as a reference from which it could be extended indefinitely. Thus it cannot possibly be described as a substub.
Did it explain what FTSE meant? did it give any information that could not be figured out from the title?
It did not explain what FTSE meant, but it did adequately describe the index. I must confess that the title looks like gobbledygook to me so subjectively I feel that none of the information can be figured out from the title by the average non-specialist reader.
I've had arguments with geogre over this. He apparently thinks that "The Old Man that the Sea is a book by Ernest Hemingway" would a substub because, being an academic, he thinks everybody knows the book. I take what I think is a more realistic approach: it's a clearly inadequate stub but it does give useful information that someone unfamiliar with American literature would surely not know. I checked this on my family. My wife knows the title and associates it with Hemingway. My children, both in their late teens, had never heard of it and couldn't even hazard a guess about what it might be. To them the information in geogre's "substub" would be incomplete but useful.
I'd hazard a guess that there are many more people in the world who fall into that class of people who haven't a clue about Hemingway's works than is generally realised. An avid reader of British and French novels, I don't believe I even got as far into American literature as Melville until I was in my twenties. This was a shame, but for British readers it is a fact of life that American novels are not as widely appreciated as their literary value would merit. I would say that probably more British people know about, and have read, Salman Rushdie than John Updyke.
Oh give me a stub any day. It performs three useful functions: firstly it provides information to readers, secondly it provides a basis for further research and expansion (or merging) and thirdly it notifies editors of a piece of verifiable information that (probably) belongs somewhere on Wikipedia. If we left the job of thinking up new articles to me, we'd end up with nothing but articles about odd programming languages.
A lot of stubs fail to be verifiable and don't cite any references. But the main problem I have with stubs is the location they're put at. For example (totally random), someone could've written a stub about Alice at the Mad Hatter's tea party and name the article "Tea Party", causing immediate work for others.
1) It's miscapitalized. 2) It's already covered elsewhere. They fail to see the big picture, search if we've already got the info at the most likely place ([[Alice in Wonderland]]) 3) Anyone looking for info on the mad hatter's tea party can end up at the stub, when in fact we have loads more info elsewhere hidden by the fact the reader found the stub. 4) Wikipedia shouldn't be about article creation, it should be about structuring the incoming stuff in a logical way and place it were readers should be looking at it.
You could write a stub about DNA structure. But if someone can't find an article there, shouldn't it be reasonable to assume they search in DNA next?
--Mgm
On 9/15/05, f crdfa f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
It did not explain what FTSE meant, but it did adequately describe the index. I must confess that the title looks like gobbledygook to me so subjectively I feel that none of the information can be figured out from the title by the average non-specialist reader.
Not an expert and I've never studief the area but could get everyhting from the title. wikipedia is not a dictionary
I've had arguments with geogre over this. He apparently thinks that "The Old Man that the Sea is a book by Ernest Hemingway" would a substub because, being an academic, he thinks everybody knows the book. I take what I think is a more realistic approach: it's a clearly inadequate stub but it does give useful information that someone unfamiliar with American literature would surely not know. I checked this on my family. My wife knows the title and associates it with Hemingway. My children, both in their late teens, had never heard of it and couldn't even hazard a guess about what it might be. To them the information in geogre's "substub" would be incomplete but useful.
perhaps but consider if a follow a link to it hopeing for a real amount of information I'm not going to be best pleased.