Sigvat Stensholt wrote:
As noted earlier in this thread, that is exactly the moral I've learned. Wikipedia has no tolerance for works in progress.
I tend to agree with Guy's and Aaron's evaluation here. The article, once it enters main namespace, is in the frontline. People making a "normal" search for it will be able to access it. The article should be able to stand on its own legs by then and if it doesn't it should be deleted, even if the subject is notable and a proper article can be written in its place.
For example, the first edition we got about Robert Aumann contained
"He won the Nobel Prize!"
Lets go through why this type of article is bad. First, the article is not very useful to the readers. The people who are likely to look up Robert Aumann are those who read that he had won the economics prize already. The people who didn't know this would also find the article useless. (They would think "Huh?, What Nobel prize? When? For what?". Second, it is an embarrassment to Wikipedia if people look this up or follow a bluelink, expecting to find a real article, and find this. The reader is annoyed and decides that the reputation of Wikipedia being low quality is absolutely true. Third, the presence of such articles, written by a veteran Wikipedian I might add, tells newbies that they don't need to put any effort into writing the articles (after all the vets don't), and that makes the quality of newer articles very poor.
Therefore, that revision of the article was speedy deleted, based on the criterion of little or no context. So when you push the save button on a new article make sure that you have made an attempt at answering
*What/Who IS the subject? *Why should the reader care? *Could this article be useful to anyone?
If you plan on making a longer article for first submission and don't want to suffer a browser crash right before you submit it, you can put work in progress on a subpage of you userpage, and then move it off to the main article namespace when the article is in reasonably good shape.
This is not extreme immediatism. A poorly written, or short article which is still useful and establishes context can be included.
Sigvat Stensholt (AKA "Sjakkalle")
Just curious...have you read the revision Sean saved? Because while stubby, it was far from one or two context-less sentences. (I do think brenneman has a point, but a lot of the messages on this matter seem to think Sean's initial article was crap.)
John