From: MuZemike muzemike@gmail.com

Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs? To: English Wikipediawikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID:4CF4576D.3030908@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

And that's another problem that I am seeing more and more of. Call it simply being lazy, unable to write actual prose, or a combination thereof; but there are so many articles that get created that have only one (likely unsourced) sentence, a pretty infobox, a pretty navbox, a table, categories, and what other (stub) templates there.

I would claim that infoboxes are the biggest culprit in that they are being substituted for "actual prose". If an article creator only has one actual sentence of prose to put forth, that is not much, and I would claim sheer laziness in the article creator's part.

Especially with these stubs on locations, when you cannot provide any more information on a location than what would normally be presented in an organized list or even an atlas or map, one wonders if writing about a location in the form of an encyclopedia article is the most efficient way to go.

-MuZemike

Another thing to consider is that not everyone can write in English, but they *can* take an article from the wikipedia in their language and bash something together in English, and if they can fill in the data from a standardized infobox, there is an article which provides a lot more than [[foo]] is a town in [[bar]]. It's not necessarily laziness if there is a lack of prose in an article.

I don't speak Polish, Italian, or Swedish at all, and not much French or Spanish, yet I have managed to create a couple of US city articles on all of these wikipedias. (By way of example, six of the other language Wikipedia articles on [[Sebring, Florida]] were started by me.) All of them have an infobox, a weather chart, and appropriate categories, a mention of [[Sebring International Raceway]] and the [[12 hours of Sebring]] (which usually already had articles), and many of them have a translation of the Rambot boilerplate paragraph (if had had been translated on another US city article, which allowed me to plug in the correct numbers), and include links to the US Census Bureau population estimates data as references. While it is not much more than an atlas, it *is* more, and once the article is created it is easy for other users to expand it.

-Horologium