2007/4/28, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
But I do think we should discuss it... is it better to have 1000 stubs or 100 long well-written articles?
I think the key point here is when you want the encyclopedia to be good. If you want it to be good now, then 100 long articles is best. If you want it to be good in a couple of years, then 1000 stubs (assuming they are good stubs, but that's another debate) is better.
This is based on the assumption than stubs will eventually become articles (and faster than non-existent pages do).
Indeed. My own idea here is that 1. The great majority of non-stubs have at least one macro-edit, that is, an edit that adds so much new material that the material from that edit alone would already be a non-stub (looking at size only). 2. Although stubs are more likely to be edited than new pages are to be created, macro-edits on stubs are neither more nor less likely than new pages are to be created as non-stubs in the first place.
The first assumption is one that I think most people would agree on. The second one might be based too much on my own pattern of editing. Minor and meso (neither minor nor macro) edits are usually done because I stumble upon a page and find there is something for me to correct or improve, but the idea for macro-edits usually come when I am not editing Wikipedia at all, but reading about the subject or something similar. This might be different for other people, but I am not sure about that. Is a stub really more inviting *for macro-edits* than a red link?
Still, I guess that for the small Wikipedias, there is another thing that could speak in favor of the '1000 stubs': Their first issue will be to get people, more than to get articles. And the 1000 stubs would mean 10 times as many interwiki links and 10 times as many pages on Google (although I assume Google and other search engines might give higher status to larger articles, thus partly undoing that advantage), and thus 10 times as many chances for people to learn that there is a Wikipedia in their language as well.