[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l digest, Vol 1 #686 - 14 msgs

[Jeroen Heijmans]

Fred Bauder wrote:

>Precisely the point. An aggressive campaign against stubs and a policy
>which results not only in deletion but them being irrecoverable is not
>that. Stubs are not only a bit of information, but a seed planted, a part
>of the more general structure of knowledge. 
>
If you'd bother to read what we write, you'd see that we are NOT 
campaigning against stubs. I repeat: we are not campaigning against 
stubs. In my vocabulary, with the current context, a stub is something 
that is not the real thing, but that does perform some part of what the 
real thing is expected to do (in analogy with, for example, developing 
software). For an encyclopedia article, that means that a stub performs 
some of the required functionality (explaining some term) but not fully. 
In a sense, almost all Wikipedia articles are stubs, as they do not tell 
everything there is to be told about a certain topic. However, in normal 
usage, stubs are those articles that merely contain a short definition; 
but it is still an article. The pages that we are talking about here are 
not stubs. They're less than that.