[WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?

[Andrew Gray]

On 29 November 2010 17:33, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Stubs and how to handle them seem to be controversial still (or again),
> which is rather surprising given that we have been going nearly a decade
> now. I'd like to ask how many articles still are stubs, by some sensible
> standard?

Currently, 73% of enwp articles have some form of quality assessment.
13% have the "infrastructure" for assessment - talkpage templates -
but no rating as yet; the remaining 14% are entirely unknown to the
assessment system.

Of the assessed articles, two thirds are rated as stubs.

However, there's a massive great caveat to that: an awful lot of them
aren't. Based on my experience, I'd say anything from a quarter to a
half of the "stub" articles are not, by any reasonable definition,
stubs. It's not uncommon now to see a multiple-paragraph article with
an infobox, image and external links - lacking in many aspects of its
coverage, no doubt, but a nontrivial amount of content - labelled as a
stub.

There's three factors at work here.

a) Redefinition: As our standards grow higher, "stub" gets repurposed
as a catch-all term for "very low-quality article"
b) Lag: articles being marked as stubs, then expanding, but the tag
not being removed (or removed from the talkpage and not from the
rating template).
c) Drift: people see the articles marked as stub in a) and b), and
assume this is what one should be like, so grade accordingly.

Overall, using the traditional definition of "short placeholder
article providing a basic degree of context", the sort of thing you
might perhaps find in a concise reference work - I'd say ~50% of our
articles. I *think* the proportion of stubs created now is less than
the proportion created in, say, 2006, but I don't have much evidence
to back that up.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk