stubification to the max! (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Defamatory Biographies - another problem looming forWikipedia?)

[Geoff Burling]

On Wed, 21 Dec 2005, Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
> G'day Geoff,
>
> > On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, David Gerard wrote:
> >>Geoff Burling wrote:
> >>>(And for the record, when I find an article with more than one stub tag
> >>>attached, I always reduce the number to one. Don't like it? Then turn
> >>>the stub into an article, & we'll both be happy.)
> >>
> >>PLEASE DON'T DO THIS. Different stubs are subcategories of different
> >>parent categories. Someone from a wikiproject about content will often
> >>go into that project's stub category and start work on stuff they find
> >>there.
> >
> > Are you serious? To repeat myself, how many stub notices does Wikipedia
> > need on any given article? This is the silliest idea I've seen proposed
> > here -- including many I have proposed -- for these & probably many
> > more reasons:
>
> <snip reasons />
>
> Perhaps the developers could dream up some way to add the benefits of
> multiple stub templates (multiple categories) but hide the text of all
> but one template?  Or even some new text --- if there's more than one
> template present with the word "stub" in it, only print the categories
> as well as "This multi-category article is a stub ..." or something.  Or
> perhaps that's too difficult.

That is something I have often wondered. Some kinds of stubs lend themselves
to more than one category -- but were it possible to simply add something
like {{subst:stub}} to an article, & send a flag to all of the categories
that this article needed attention!
>
> > Until reducing multiple stubs becomes a bannible offence, I will
> > continue to do it, based on my editorial discression. you have been warned.
>
> Will you also edit war with the Wikiproject Stub-Sorting people who
> regularly patrol stub categories and will add any templates they deem to
> be "missing" from an article?

Naw, I'm too preoccupied with other things to waste time edit-warring.
And I have found that the best tactic when faced with this kind of
confrontation is to walk away -- then make my changes several months later,
after the miscreant has gotten her/himself banned.
>
> Stub templates, as far as I'm concerned, are the domain of WSS.  Not our
> problem.  If I'm willing to go the extra mile and add exact stub
> templates, I will; if I'm not, I'll just put {{stub}} and let them sort
> it out.  If we don't like how stub categorising is handled, the solution
> is to either participate in WSS and argue with *them*, or to simply
> refuse to participate and stick to plain-jane {{stub}}.  It's not to
> deliberately mess around the work they're doing (as you're proposing,
> and SPUI received a block for a while back for doing).

I suspect that most of them aren't too keen on multiple stub templates
for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere. Until now, no one's even noticed
what I've been doing.
>
> I'm sure there's work elsewhere on Wikipedia of which you're rather proud?
>
I've been trying to corral a decent sampling of articles for
[[Wikipedia:Good articles]]. And I've written a few biographical articles
on Ethiopian people. Why do you ask?

> > [snip]
> >
> >>> When I used to do New Article Patrol on a regular basis, I found myself
> >>>wikifying new articles, rather than tagging them for deletion. (Despite
> >>>the kill-happy reputation of AfD, I found it far easier to subject these
> >>>articles to a scrubbing than listing them.) Then I saw David Gerard's
> >>>comment about 90% of new articles were dreck, & started to suspect my own
> >>>judgement. So I lost interest in that chore.*
> >>
> >>I didn't say 90%, I said 20-30%!
> >
> > You're right. I went back & checked my log of Wiki-EN mail, & I
> > misremembered the figure. (I'm amazed, though, at how many people threw
> > around "90%" when talking about issues.) I sincerely apologize.
>
> It depends how you define "drek".  If "drek" means unsalvagable, then
> I'd agree, no more than 20-30%.  If it means "crap", then (before anon
> users were prevented from creating new articles), I'd say easily 90% of
> new articles created by anons were crap and in need of cleanup, if not
> necessarily nuking from orbit.
>
By "drek" I meant new articles David described in another email as
"shoot-on-sight". People complain that many -- if not most -- of our
articles are mediocre: there are times when I feel many articles on
notable subjects aren't even _that_ good.

Geoff