On Wednesday 28 August 2002 04:06 am, Karen wrote:

Gibberish is not an article. Blank pages are not an article. And nonsense phrases posted by a casual passerby are not an article. They just take up space that a real article could use. If it was a real article it would say something like 'Kate Hudson is (blah blah blah)'. Leaving this doesn't encourage the writer to make real contributions - if anything it encourages them to leave more nonsense to clutter up the space!

I totally agree - and thank you for making the distinction between and article and a mere page.

A BLANK OR GIBBERISH PAGE IS NOT AN ARTICLE. So there isn't any reason why it shouldn't be voted for deletion if not deleted outright (of course, if it looks like a non-malicious newbie experiment we shouldn't be harsh when we delete the page -- at least say hi in the delete summary).

Stubs on encyclopedia or almanac topics that have decent definitions /should not/ be deleted however -- these are the beginning of articles. So long as a subject is adequately defined (something I find to be a non-trivial task -- "a large city in Texas" DOES NOT cut it though), then passer-bys can incrementally build the definition into a proper stub and then into an article based on their incomplete knowledge of the subject.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)