Well, I talk as an admin of Friulian Wiki (fur.wiki). I don't like thousand of stubs, I prefer less articles, but more complete. This doesn't mean as complete as in big Wikis, because it would take me too much time to translate a full article from, say, en.wiki, I usually translate instead from the Wikipedia in Catalan, since they seem to have a good balance between length and completeness. I also think every wiki should rather add stubs that have good chances to develop. We are currently adding the States of the world, since this is a subject which is pretty well covered in other languages. I instead said no to adding as stubs the 8000 "communites" of Italy. That addition could bring us to the magic 10 000 threshold (we are at 2000) but most of those articles IMHO will stay stub forever, since even in Italian wiki they're in this state. What we are focusing on are articles about local themes, personalities and so on, stuff that you can't find elsewhere, and so you have to create from scratch, but are pretty interesting for casual users; we also had some media exposure, and so there's room for more development. I'm proud that we have already the biggest collection of text in Friulian language, and we are following the official orthography (that is very important, I wouldn't even start if there wasn't an unique orthography. Cope with different versions is really too much work). Hope you can understand my bad English ;-) Andre
On 4/28/07, Berto 'd Sera albertoserra@ukr.net wrote:
But I do think we should discuss it... is it better to have 1000 stubs or 100 long well-written articles?
I originally rated stubs as no more than a trick to fake a higher article count. I have to admit that stubs succeeded in capturing activity, people start adding stuff, those who cannot write properly add pictures, but there is a quantity of activity they capture.
Same applies to red links, although a stub seems to be more immediate in asking participation. On the other hand, stubs grow quite casually and eventually need to be rewritten into a proper article, because they do capture stuff but have no underlying scheme.
I suppose there's no general rule, though. It would be easier to judge if we could have a curve about "stub growth in time". Ours started to grow some 4-5 months after being made, some are just moving now after a year and some are still empty stubs. Intuitively I'd say some 30-40% of them did capture material (it was about 300-500 pieces about botanic and zoology).
Maybe it would have been better if we had used a wider distribution as per subject. Who knows?
Bèrto 'd Sèra Personagi dl'ann 2006 për l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojàotri) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
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