[Wikipedia-l] Truth in advertising

[Toby Bartels]

maveric149 wrote:

>The Cunctator wrote:

>>To implement this we need two components:
>>* a way of denoting "insufficient" entries (or "sub-stubs" or
>>"micro-stubs", etc.) similar to the "watch this page" function
>>* a way of marking such entries in the text of the entries; e.g. different
>>link coloration or a "!" instead of a "?"

>This has already been suggested in one way or another by several people now,
>including me. This could in fact be married with the proposed 500
>byte/character article definition cut-off whereby any page that is less than
>500 characters yet meets the current criteria for automatic article detection
>would be marked as being a stub.

I said that I would probably follow orange links a lot with this proposal.
Actually, that may not be true if the threshold is as high as 500 bytes.
Lower than 500 B is certainly stubby, which is why I think
that 500 B is a good cutoff for estimating what an article is.
But 400 B isn't something that desperately needs attention,
lest we all be embarrassed when visitors look at the horrid little thing.
I'd prefer a cutoff of around 100 bytes.

Here I'm just arguing over details; I'm coming to like the idea.

While I'm on the subject of details, let's make them green instead of orange.
The difference between existent and nonexistent is much greater than
the difference between long and short.  "!" is great for the "?" style.


-- Toby