"Ray Saintonge" saintonge@telus.net wrote in message news:46337960.3030906@telus.net...
Thomas Dalton wrote:
The point being that I would expect stub article creation to be pretty
high
in new Wikipedias, and to tail off as the Wikipedia in question comes to
be
seen as more authoritative.
That's a very valid point. That would contribute to an upward trend of stub ratios with increasing edits, which is exactly what I see for Wikipedias with less than 20,000 edits, but after that it levels out, and becomes much less variable. I can't think why.
Perhaps it's the point at which a project becomes more authoritarian than authoritative. It's where people become concerned that stubs somehow reflect badly on the project, and they start to delete the stubs on that basis.
While that may be true, that's not the point I was trying to make. The issue is not with people deleting stubs so much as people no longer creating them once the Wikipedia has reached a critical mass. If I search for an article on en and it doesn't exist, my assumption (unless it's something very obscure) is that there is a reason it doesn't exist, e.g. it is under another name, or covered as part of a wider article. If I did anything it would be to create a redirect to some other article, not to create a stub.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)