On 3/4/06, Andreas Vilén andreas.vilen@gmail.com wrote:
Before rushing into this stub maniac, please think! Is it really a good idea to massadd substubs? Is the 'pedia of higher quality because it has more substubs about 20000 obscure regions than without them? If this is used, I believe it should aim towards making relevant articles that can be easily expanded by people speaking the language. We've seen what mass content adders have done to itwiki and plwiki, they simply rush to get many articles and completely forget about quality... Remember http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Substub_disease !
There is no rush. I don't expect that we would add some relevant data in the next couple of months. For example, if we want to make articles about all countries in the world, we need a lot of work on localization of templates, categories and a couple of sentences.
BUT, when we are talking about stubs on, for example, Swahili Wikipedia, for example, article about Mongolian language which would contain that: (1) How "Mongolian language" is written in Mongolian; (2) it is spoken in [[China]], [[Kyrgyzstan]], [[Mongolia]], [[Russia]]; (3) it is spoken by 5,7 million of humans; (4) genetic classification of Mongolian language is: Altaic (disputed) -> Mongolic -> Eastern -> Oirat-Khalkha -> Khalkha-Buryat -> Mongolian; (5) language is official in Mongolia, China (Inner Mongolia), Russia (Buryatia); (6) the language is not regulated; (7) ISO and Ethnologue codes are ...; (8) consonants and vowels are... etc. -- I think that it can be treated as a stub on English Wikipedia, but it is very informative article for a person who knows Swahili, but doesn't know English. And it is completely possible to do with bots and localization.
Also, a lot of languages which don't have more then 50 millions of speakers (I think that there are maybe 20 languages with more then 50 millions of speakers!) -- don't have encyclopedias like Britannica and similar. For example, the biggest encyclopedia in Serbian language has almost 100.000 articles. BUT, I saw that encyclopedia maybe two times in my life (I saw Britannica a lot often even I am living in Belgrade!). "Ordinary encyclopedia", which can be found in almost every house, has between 30.000-50.000 very small articles. 90% of such articles would be stubs on Serbian Wikipedia.
In other words: Maybe people who are native speakers of English, German, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, French and Portuguese are able to have "higher standards" about what article is stub and what is not; they may remove article with one sentence about some Arabic dynasty, but our encyclopedias are full of such articles AND this sentence is very relevant encyclopedic information. And we are not talking about one-two sentence articles, but about articles which would not be stubs even for English Wikipedia. (I can make one page article about Mongolian based on information from the article on English Wikipedia.)