Andreas Vilén wrote:
Before rushing into this stub maniac, please think! Is it really a good idea to massadd substubs?
Instead of introvertly "thinking" about it, if anybody would actually make a scientific study of growth strategies of various wikis (or languages of Wikipedia), I'm afraid they would find that adding lots of stubs actually does pay off, at least in the short run. It makes the website a bigger target for search engine queries, and this draws a bigger audience, from where contributors are recruited. Creating a stub entry for every little town in the country where the language is spoken, or for every semi-famous person that speaks the language, can fill gaps that other websites in the same language didn't cover. The importance of this effect depends heavily on how many other websites already exist in the language. For English, when Wikipedia started in 2001, IMDb.com already covered most every actor and film director. But in German this was not the case, and the German Wikipedia filled a really big gap during its rapid growth in 2002-2004. I think there can be a really big advantage in taking the substub track to growth. If you want to stay on the quality track, you will need really strong policies and actions.
For Swedish, one can say that susning.nu absorbed the substub phase during its rapid growth in 2002-2003, and this has been used as an argument to do something better with the Swedish Wikipedia.