[WikiEN-l] A Day in the Life of an Article

[Peter Ansell]

On 18/09/2007, InkSplotch <inkblot14 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good evening, gentle folk,
> Is cruft this bad?  Are stub articles choking the encyclopedia?  On
> the flip side, is our good faith really so...short?  How long should
> we give an editor after they create an article to fully source it,
> establish notability, etc.  How long for an admin?  And if there is no
> window of grace in first creating an article, should someone approach
> the bot makers?  Would it make sense to have a bot simply speedy
> articles under a set number of characters?

Stub articles and cruft seem to be sickening to wikipedians. Perhaps
it is infecting the entire encyclopedia, which afterall is rather like
a paper encyclopedia to most people, so it can only contain the best
of everything and not propose knowledge that hasn't already been
written in proper "Manual Of Style" headers with a perfect lead
section.

Putting an article through the entire "deletion process" really does
waste time. Why not see if you can improve on the article? Instead
there are wikipedians (possibly admins) who, figuring there are too
many articles which are in dire need of their personal attention to
actually put time into just one, will either delete it or slap a tag
on it and move on to the next presumably cruft/stub topic.

Production lines don't have intelligence; why should Wikipedia be
stuck in that grain too.

Peter