|content-class: urn:content-classes:message |Content-Type: text/plain; | charset="iso-8859-1" |X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.5762.3 |X-MS-Has-Attach: |X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: |Thread-Topic: Wikipedia-l digest, Vol 1 #601 - 12 msgs |Thread-Index: AcJOguAne7vomrbCTaCiLRy/S9pD5AA6Z3uw |From: "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com |X-OriginalArrivalTime: 29 Aug 2002 15:10:12.0156 (UTC) FILETIME=[2BEA2FC0:01C24F6E] |X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by ross.bomis.com id g7TFB3Z23095 |Sender: wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com |X-BeenThere: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com |X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.4 |Precedence: bulk |Reply-To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com |List-Help: mailto:wikipedia-l-request@nupedia.com?subject=help |List-Post: mailto:wikipedia-l@nupedia.com |List-Subscribe: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l, | mailto:wikipedia-l-request@nupedia.com?subject=subscribe |List-Id: An unmoderated discussion of all things Wikipedia <wikipedia-l.nupedia.com> |List-Unsubscribe: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l, | mailto:wikipedia-l-request@nupedia.com?subject=unsubscribe |List-Archive: http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/ |Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2002 11:10:11 -0400 | |It seems to me we are trying to impove the number and quality of our articles, merely by making a policy: | |1. All articles will be brilliant prose. |2. No useless stubs! | |This is futile. (It reminds me of Robert Heinlein's "Friday", in |which the state of California, having noted that college graduates |have significantly higher income than non-grads, officially awarded |every resident of California a college degree. Needless to say, the |policy did not have the desired effect.) |
When Mensa took over Springfield on The Simpsons, they observed that traffic moved faster when the lights were yellow, so they kept them yellow all the time.
There won't ever be a workable stub policy that is better than regular contributors paying attention. It certainly reduces the available information for there to be an article consisting of a short random string which shows up without the ? in wikipedia displays. On the other hand, I have recently jumped in to rescue three legitimate topics -- [[Mouthpiece]], [[Ununennium]], and [[Arts and Crafts Movement]] -- where if there hadn't been a stub that someone was hot to delete, I never would have known that additional information that I had was needed for the articles.
| |Our problem is not "stub policy". We just don't have enough contributors. | |Ed Poor |
It may be that outsiders, coming across an article reading in its entirety "Dallas is in Texas" are more inspired to contribute than outsiders coming across an article reading "There is currently no text on this page."
Tom Parmenter Ortolan88