Mark Clements wrote:
Authoritative. This has nothing to do with the internal systems, but with external impressions. If a user thinks of Wikipedia as an authoratitive resource, they are unlikely to add stubs because they assume that the content is already there (they just haven't managed to find it) or has been deliberately omitted.
Perhaps there is a "law" (of nature) that some 20,000 stubs will always be tolerated. For a new Wikipedia, that is the whole site. For a Wikipedia of 200,000 articles, it's only 10% of them.
One way to encourage longer articles would be to rank languages on the www.wikipedia.org front page by word count (or perhaps byte count) rather than article count. According to [1] the Chinese Wikipedia has 50.6 M words in March 2007 and the Russian has 47.1 M words, compared to the Swedish Wikipedia's 36.2 M words. Changing the ranking of the Swedish one from 9th to 11th would send a clear message to the stub-happy swedes.
[1] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseWords.htm