On Friday 27 September 2002 10:47 am, Magnus Manske wrote:

An initial version of "stub detection" is running at Lee's test site. Links to stub articles (less than 500 chars) are shown in green. REDIRECTs are shown as normal links. For example, try     http://www.piclab.com/wikitest/wiki.phtml?title=Biology

This is way cool! Magnus to the rescue again. :) What about the total article count? It has also been suggested that {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} should exclude anything less than 500 bytes. Perhaps we could then have {{NUMBEROFENTRIES}} that would use the current, far too permissive detection criteria.

I suggest to

• make the minimum size for a "real" article a user option
• set it to zero as standard

which means nobody gets this special mark-up, except they choose it in their prefernces. That would avoid confusion, especially among newcomers (blue links? and red ones? and green ones?). Also, everybody can decide how large an article has to be at least...

I could definitely see the utility of making this a user modifiable preference. But having the global default set to zero kinda defeats the "truth in advertising" argument that started this whole thread. New contributors and readers quickly figure out what edit links are and I think they will be able to quickly figure out what green (or !) links are.

Something that could state this very clearly would be a non-editable boilerplate on each sub-500 byte article that said something like; "This is a [[Wikipedia:How to write the perfect stub article|stub]] (very short page) and is therefore not counted in our total article count."

But that would be icing on the cake.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)