After some more thought on the origins of stub articles and a better overview of the contents of the Swedish Wikipedia, it is clear that very few individuals are responsible for creating large numbers of stubs, a few years back. Now, depending on religion (mergists, deletionists...), these should either be deleted, improved, merged or put on lists of necessary quality improvements. Either way, it's a lot of work and it would have been better to have stopped those invidiuals back then. At least we want to stop such individuals today, so the same mistake isn't repeated while the old mess is being cleaned up.
What we want is to foster a spirit of writing better articles, improving the one you started, before you start the next one.
But instead of increased patrolling and speedy deletions, this could be implemented in the Mediawiki software. If a user (logged in or IP address) tries to create a new page, their recent contribution history could be checked, and if any of their five most recently created articles (except redirects) are shorter than, say, 300 bytes, they would simply be unable to create another article. This would be a very soft kind of blocking (as soon as you have improved your existing article, you can start the next one), each case being completely an affair between the user and the software, not involving opinions of individual admins.
Such an extension (is there an "article creation hook"?) could be fully parameterized, so each community could decide where to set the limits (5 recently created articles, 300 bytes), and what message to show to the user who violates these limits.
Has this been suggested before? Has it been implemented? Would it be a really bad idea to suggest this?
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 4:29 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
After some more thought on the origins of stub articles and a better overview of the contents of the Swedish Wikipedia, it is clear that very few individuals are responsible for creating large numbers of stubs, a few years back. Now, depending on religion (mergists, deletionists...), these should either be deleted, improved, merged or put on lists of necessary quality improvements. Either way, it's a lot of work and it would have been better to have stopped those invidiuals back then. At least we want to stop such individuals today, so the same mistake isn't repeated while the old mess is being cleaned up.
That depends on your point of view. An inclusionist might well say that they should be kept and improved, but that in the meantime, better to have the stubs than not. After all, that might encourage people to improve them more than having nothing at all; it allows them to be categorized so that people interested in the subject can go through the stubs in their specialty systematically; a couple of sentences can sometimes be useful; etc. That would be my personal position, in fact.
But instead of increased patrolling and speedy deletions, this could be implemented in the Mediawiki software. If a user (logged in or IP address) tries to create a new page, their recent contribution history could be checked, and if any of their five most recently created articles (except redirects) are shorter than, say, 300 bytes, they would simply be unable to create another article. This would be a very soft kind of blocking (as soon as you have improved your existing article, you can start the next one), each case being completely an affair between the user and the software, not involving opinions of individual admins.
Such an extension (is there an "article creation hook"?) could be fully parameterized, so each community could decide where to set the limits (5 recently created articles, 300 bytes), and what message to show to the user who violates these limits.
It would be quite easy to do this. However, usually we shy away from granular access control in the software. The usual thought is that this sort of policy should be enforced by the community, not the software. Rather than outright blocking edits, people could keep an eye on article creation and suggest to prolific stub creators that they spend more effort on each article. Likewise there's no facility for blocking a user from a specific activity (e.g., a specific page, namespace, uploading, etc.): just tell them not to do it, and threaten to block them from everything if they refuse.
Of course, I'm not the one who gets to decide whether a particular extension should be allowed, so this is just my take on it.
On the Hungarian Wikipedia we have implemented a community solution for this:articles that do not contain a minimum number of facts (let's say a minimum of 10 pieces of information on the subject) get tagged as "sub-stubs" and after 7 days if there is no improvement, they are deleted.
Best regards, Bence Damokos
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
After some more thought on the origins of stub articles and a better overview of the contents of the Swedish Wikipedia, it is clear that very few individuals are responsible for creating large numbers of stubs, a few years back. Now, depending on religion (mergists, deletionists...), these should either be deleted, improved, merged or put on lists of necessary quality improvements. Either way, it's a lot of work and it would have been better to have stopped those invidiuals back then. At least we want to stop such individuals today, so the same mistake isn't repeated while the old mess is being cleaned up.
What we want is to foster a spirit of writing better articles, improving the one you started, before you start the next one.
But instead of increased patrolling and speedy deletions, this could be implemented in the Mediawiki software. If a user (logged in or IP address) tries to create a new page, their recent contribution history could be checked, and if any of their five most recently created articles (except redirects) are shorter than, say, 300 bytes, they would simply be unable to create another article. This would be a very soft kind of blocking (as soon as you have improved your existing article, you can start the next one), each case being completely an affair between the user and the software, not involving opinions of individual admins.
Such an extension (is there an "article creation hook"?) could be fully parameterized, so each community could decide where to set the limits (5 recently created articles, 300 bytes), and what message to show to the user who violates these limits.
Has this been suggested before? Has it been implemented? Would it be a really bad idea to suggest this?
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
But instead of increased patrolling and speedy deletions, this could be implemented in the Mediawiki software. If a user (logged in or IP address) tries to create a new page, their recent contribution history could be checked, and if any of their five most recently created articles (except redirects) are shorter than, say, 300 bytes, they would simply be unable to create another article. This would be a very soft kind of blocking (as soon as you have improved your existing article, you can start the next one), each case being completely an affair between the user and the software, not involving opinions of individual admins.
Such an extension (is there an "article creation hook"?) could be fully parameterized, so each community could decide where to set the limits (5 recently created articles, 300 bytes), and what message to show to the user who violates these limits.
Has this been suggested before? Has it been implemented? Would it be a really bad idea to suggest this?
I can't see any reason why it couldn't be implemented (I don't know how easy it would be). Before anyone actually spends time coding it, though, is there a consensus on the Swedish Wikipedia to use such a system or is it just your idea? If it's the latter, then you should probably establish a consensus first (since I'm not sure other projects would use the extension, it's not really worth writing if you aren't going to use it).
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
But instead of increased patrolling and speedy deletions, this could be implemented in the Mediawiki software. If a user (logged in or IP address) tries to create a new page, their recent contribution history could be checked, and if any of their five most recently created articles (except redirects) are shorter than, say, 300 bytes, they would simply be unable to create another article. This would be a very soft kind of blocking (as soon as you have improved your existing article, you can start the next one), each case being completely an affair between the user and the software, not involving opinions of individual admins.
Sounds like a bad idea. If the community doesn't want these stubs, the better way to act would be to create an easy method to get these pages deleted. A system such as you propose would punish people who make short pages for perfectly good reasons (like disambiguation pages), and would likely be subverted using lengthenings that make the article worse rather than better (like subst-ing rather than including complicated templates).
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
.. But instead of increased patrolling and speedy deletions, this could be implemented in the Mediawiki software. If a user (logged in or IP address) tries to create a new page, their recent contribution history could be checked, and if any of their five most recently created articles (except redirects) are shorter than, say, 300 bytes, they would simply be unable to create another article.
Or maybe just a warning. Most people act on good faith (Thats why a wikipedia is possible).
Another idea: A big link "Do you want to contribute to the wikipedia?" -- click --> "Here is a list of articles you can help expanding". So these stubs expand to good fun fat wikipedia articles :-)
And If you want a evil solution, here is one:
code a "Category:Recyble-bin", any article on that category with edits old than 31 days, get deleted.
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
After some more thought on the origins of stub articles and a better overview of the contents of the Swedish Wikipedia, it is clear that very few individuals are responsible for creating large numbers of stubs, a few years back. Now, depending on religion (mergists, deletionists...), these should either be deleted, improved, merged or put on lists of necessary quality improvements. Either way, it's a lot of work and it would have been better to have stopped those invidiuals back then. At least we want to stop such individuals today, so the same mistake isn't repeated while the old mess is being cleaned up.
What we want is to foster a spirit of writing better articles, improving the one you started, before you start the next one.
But instead of increased patrolling and speedy deletions, this could be implemented in the Mediawiki software. If a user (logged in or IP address) tries to create a new page, their recent contribution history could be checked, and if any of their five most recently created articles (except redirects) are shorter than, say, 300 bytes, they would simply be unable to create another article. This would be a very soft kind of blocking (as soon as you have improved your existing article, you can start the next one), each case being completely an affair between the user and the software, not involving opinions of individual admins.
Such an extension (is there an "article creation hook"?) could be fully parameterized, so each community could decide where to set the limits (5 recently created articles, 300 bytes), and what message to show to the user who violates these limits.
Has this been suggested before? Has it been implemented? Would it be a really bad idea to suggest this?
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
Actually this sounds like a good idea. but not blocking, Just show a warning to the user saying "The article you are saving aren't rich enough, please enrich it and /link/try again// or you can //save it anyway//." also make things like {{templates}} and interwikis and categories not included in the size.
Hoi, When you consider those stub articles, I would not be surprised that these stubs are linked quite a lot to other languages versions of Wikipedia. Consequently the information that is not in the article could be found through the links in other Wikipedias. When you say that the Swedish wikipedia would have been better off without the stubs, you forget the value that exists in finding information in this way.
Given this value, what is wrong with expanding stubs when you feel like it ?
Thanks, GerardM
2008/12/1 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se
After some more thought on the origins of stub articles and a better overview of the contents of the Swedish Wikipedia, it is clear that very few individuals are responsible for creating large numbers of stubs, a few years back. Now, depending on religion (mergists, deletionists...), these should either be deleted, improved, merged or put on lists of necessary quality improvements. Either way, it's a lot of work and it would have been better to have stopped those invidiuals back then. At least we want to stop such individuals today, so the same mistake isn't repeated while the old mess is being cleaned up.
What we want is to foster a spirit of writing better articles, improving the one you started, before you start the next one.
But instead of increased patrolling and speedy deletions, this could be implemented in the Mediawiki software. If a user (logged in or IP address) tries to create a new page, their recent contribution history could be checked, and if any of their five most recently created articles (except redirects) are shorter than, say, 300 bytes, they would simply be unable to create another article. This would be a very soft kind of blocking (as soon as you have improved your existing article, you can start the next one), each case being completely an affair between the user and the software, not involving opinions of individual admins.
Such an extension (is there an "article creation hook"?) could be fully parameterized, so each community could decide where to set the limits (5 recently created articles, 300 bytes), and what message to show to the user who violates these limits.
Has this been suggested before? Has it been implemented? Would it be a really bad idea to suggest this?
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
When you consider those stub articles, I would not be surprised that these stubs are linked quite a lot to other languages versions of Wikipedia. Consequently the information that is not in the article could be found through the links in other Wikipedias. When you say that the Swedish wikipedia would have been better off without the stubs, you forget the value that exists in finding information in this way.
You are now talking about things that you have no experience in, and I'm not going to discuss the Swedish Wikipedia on this list. When you learn Swedish, come to the Swedish Wikipedia and help to improve it.
This is wikitech-l, and I'm discussing a new mechanism for putting a quota on stub creation. Let's stick to that subject.
Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se writes:
This is wikitech-l, and I'm discussing a new mechanism for putting a quota on stub creation. Let's stick to that subject.
You can never solve an attitude problem with technical means. So just forget the idea.
Anders Wegge Keller wrote:
You can never solve an attitude problem with technical means. So just forget the idea.
OK.
Hoi, In your original mail you ask: "Would it be a really bad idea to suggest this?", I have replied to this question of yours. I do not need to know a word of Swedish to answer your request as it was asked in English. Did you mean to ask this question? Thanks, GerardM
2008/12/2 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
When you consider those stub articles, I would not be surprised that these stubs are linked quite a lot to other languages versions of Wikipedia. Consequently the information that is not in the article could be found through the links in other Wikipedias. When you say that the Swedish wikipedia would have been better off without the stubs, you forget the value that exists in finding information in this way.
You are now talking about things that you have no experience in, and I'm not going to discuss the Swedish Wikipedia on this list. When you learn Swedish, come to the Swedish Wikipedia and help to improve it.
This is wikitech-l, and I'm discussing a new mechanism for putting a quota on stub creation. Let's stick to that subject.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org