[Wikipedia-l] Stub triage

[Daniel Mayer]

On Monday 23 September 2002 11:00 pm, you wrote:
> André is deleting truly useless pages, so is Mav and so am I. We are
> trying to do what we think is good for Wikipedia - if we wanted to do
> harm, there's far easier and better was than to delete ultra-crappy
> pages with no content. If I have to explain every single move and
> deletion and addition I make here and have it approved by all
> Wikipedians, we might as well stop the entire project. I'm doing this
> while thinking reasonable. If you think that deletion was wrong: go
> ahead and write a great article about the subject - don't make such a
> noise out of it.
>
> Jeronimo

Of course I agree. I would also like to see /many/ more micro-stubs being 
fixed by those people who think they are useful. But since the rate of 
micro-stub creation is so high I think this is a hopelessly uphill and 
ultimately futile battle. In a way the creation of unreviewed and unedited 
stubs is an emergency situation now. I remember a time several months ago 
when few pitiful stubs drooped off of Recent Changes without getting fixed. 
Now that happens at an alarming rate daily. 

It takes me less than 10 seconds to delete a useless stub that took somebody 
else less then 10 seconds to write and submit, but it takes me at least 10 
minutes to write a decent stub on a topic I know zippo about (let alone care 
about). So when I come across a couple dozen of these useless micro-stubs in 
my twice weekly clearing of the new page list I delete them and work on 
fixing stubs that are easily fixable. 

If the poster didn't bother working on their entry for more than 10 seconds 
then there is /no/ reason I should spend 10 minutes of my time fixing their 
"work" (or even 1 minute of my time posting it on the deletion queue for that 
matter -- which BTW somebody else has to spend time reviewing and then either 
delete or fix by starting from scratch). If all I did was fix every 
micro-stub I saw then I wouldn't have time to do anything else.   

If the micro-stub lovers aren't keeping up with fixing these useless pages 
then I don't think they have much room to complain about others that are 
taking care of the useless stub problem for them. I and the other micro-stub 
deletors are just trying to keep up with this onslaught by doing some stub 
triage; fixing the ones with decent definitions and deleting the ones that 
don't have decent definitions.

However, due to the fact that whatever I say here will not convince a vocal 
few, I support the compromise idea of having a type of recycle bin that keeps 
a "de-linked" page's history intact and lists it on a log page. Any links to 
that page title in the database will be replaced with an empty edit link. 
This may be as easy as creating a user interface that would allow users to 
see deleted pages and their histories and also allow users to edit those 
pages (hitting save at that point would return the page, with its complete 
history, to the database -- but please, don't return crap to the database). 

This will give the micro-stub lovers more time to convert their cherished 
useless pages into real stubs and will also give the rabid deletion death 
squad peace of mind that the database is not being filled with useless crap.  

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)