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|Thread-Topic: Wikipedia-l digest, Vol 1 #601 - 12 msgs
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|From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor(a)abc.com>
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|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