mirwin wrote:
Fredbauder wrote:
>Ok, Yes, Toby's suggestion that an article with
a good title but no content
>should be deleted is good policy.
It seems like silly makework to me.
The article will be recreated again anytime anyone
clicks on one of the links leading to it.
These links will be "?" (or highlighted) if the page is deleted,
so people following them should be intending to write articles.
If they do write content, then that's great!
I don't mind contentless pages being recreated as contentful articles.
If it is a good title then it is an invitation
for anyone who encounters it to add to it.
For somebody interested in writeing content (which is what we want),
I think that a link of "?" is more inviting than a non"?" link.
If I know about a subject, then I'll follow "?" links but not
non"?" ones.
If the non"?" link is to a contentless page, then this means
that I won't be writing articles that I otherwise would write!
A poor title seems of no loss. However, unless
it is replaced with a good title which it previous
links are edited to point at, it seems likely
that it will reoccur quickly.
Somebody had to code the initial link to the poor
title to create the article in the first place.
It seems to me that the only solid way to eliminate
poor titles is track the links and recode them to
a better title. If the new title is a new article
then unless someone undertakes a research project it
will likely be fairly empty or stubby for a while.
If I understand you correctly, than I feel similarly.
I'm much less concerned about contentless pages
with poor titles that we'll never want in an encyclopaedia.
The way to fix ''these'' is to fix the links to them.
Only once that is done will deleting the page do much good.
So it is the good titles that we disagree on, not the bad ones.
I think that having the Wikipedia Guard or Militia
routinely deleting empty good titled articles may
only slow down the growth in breadth and depth of
the Wikipedia. Some people may like organizing
the link structures and establishing good initial titles
and interconnections. Why should this contribution
be routinely deleted? How much subsequent work is
then lost from contributors who while browsing may
choose to add an easy paragraph but who will not
undertake an entire stub and the effort required
to link it appropriately into an entire encyclopedia?
I really have no idea how you think that this will work.
Do you have examples on Wikipedia?
(If I need to look in page histories to see
how this worked in the past, then that's fine too.)
Some areas of the Wikipedia already feel pretty
circular and concise. They have no sloppy or poor titles
hanging out for random fortuitous contributions from
readers. They have a concise complete feel to them
that screams static encyclopedic overview with no place
for further detail.
But I think that links to articles with no content ''adds'' to this
problem.
When the link doesn't have "?", things look even more complete.
But they are not complete, and "?"s will make things look properly incomplete!
However, I do agree with you that we have this problem in some places.
People don't follow [[Wikipedia:Always leave something undone]] enough
(a sin that I've been guilty of too often in the past).
To summarize, I am unconvinced that routine pruning
of good article titles is useful to attaining our
goals of depth, breadth, and reliability. Rather, I think
it may actually be harmful.
P.S. It might be an interesting experiment to build a
detailed maze of good article titles and stubs in some
underdeveloped subject area of the Wikipedia and toy around
with some twikification techniques.
If they're ''good'' stubs, then I'd support this experiment.
(The page that I mentioned before is [[Wikipedia:The perfect stub article]],
and point #5 is the one that I hope people consider particularly.)
If a couple of
regulars cooperated in an area of common interest
it might convince newcomers that Wikipedia is truly alive
with sufficient utilization to keep its content dynamic
and growing. As it is I think the first multi Wikipedian
contact in near realtime of many newcomers may often be in a
negative atmosphere of panic and anger as the mailing list
is attracted to some poor content locus for deletion sprees.
I hope that we never go on deletion sprees.
If we delete stubs for being too imperfect,
then every one should go to [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]] first.
I primarily just don't want things to be delisted from that page
without discussion; I'm not saying that they should all just be deleted!
P.S.2 To address the issue of the most wanted list.
Perhaps
its code could be enhanced to provide a weighted list or
set of lists. Thus two paragraph stubs referenced 26 times
which have little or no outbound links would get some
attention from people who prefer checking most wanted lists
rather than subject browsing or random inspection for
twikification efforts. Perhaps we could identify some syntax
factors that make a good Wikipedia article such as
(perhaps): length, median word size, median sentence length,
average paragraph length, number of commas, number of inbound
links, number of out bound links, editor rating, reader
rating, etc. An advantage of this approach is that eventually
various automated quality scanning tools could help people
target material needing their particular gifts or interests.
Do you know how to write the software for this?
I think that we need to deal with how [[Special:Mostwanted]]
works now, or can be made to work easily.
I'm not against your idea; it's a longer term project, that's all.
-- Toby