Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion/Log/2007/April/16

Pacific bio-stubs

 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the stub template and/or category above. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the template's or category's talk page (if any).  No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was upmerge/rename per nom

In the last day or so we have acquired several unproposed Pacific bio-stubs, none of which are likely to get within a bull's roar of threshold for categories, but all of which have them (and none of those categories has any parents, stub or perm). Ironically, the only one which seems plausibly viable has a misnamed template (PNG-bio-stub):
 * Nauru-bio-stub / ("for Naurun people") Upmerge
 * Tonga-bio-stub / Upmerge
 * PNG-bio-stub / ("for Papua New Guniean people") Rename as PapuaNewGuinea-bio-stub and upmerge.
 * Samoa-bio-stub / Upmerge - this one is the only one populated. it gets to 40, which is reasonable, but not at threshold. Double-cattying to  and  would make far more sense.

As to whether these are likely to reach threshold, there are currently only 169 stubs in Oceanian people stubs not already marked with a nationality. More than 1 in 3 of them would have to be in any of these categories to make them viable. In the case of Nauru, BTW, it would take 1% of the country's entire population having stub articles for this to reach threshold! Grutness...wha?  08:12, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Very Strong Keep - Stop being Discriminating. Oceania is something which is used 'In General' but it doesnt actually tell you which country they belong to and as a matter of fact the only reason I by-passed the stub proposal was that I didnt know about it. There was a stub present relating to fiji Fiji-bio-stub so why shouldnt there be one for Samoa, Tonga and Papua New Guinea. These are countries of importance from my Point of View and there was a stub for Samoa (Samoa-stub) but it was too general and it was hard to tell if it was regarding Samoan people or government organisation or places and the same applies to Tonga and Papua New Guinea. Samoa and Tonga (apart from fiji) are the two other biggest "nations" in the South Pacific region and if someone is to create an article on some of the people in the pacific region, it would be easier to class them because the Island nations have three type of people, Melanesians, Polynesians and Micronesians and if in the WP:BIO, the persons country is noted, it would be easier to differentiate between them. Most Articles regarding Samoan and Tongan rugby players would need their own coutry of origin stub and the bio stub is the best one to use because most people of notability that come from these island are usually rugby players and there are so many of them and the Samoa-bio-stub and Tonga-bio-stub would be the best ones to use...If there is anything needed to be discussed, do it on my talk page..Thanks..-- Cometstyles 12:06, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * What Grutness is saying is simply that stub categories are routinely deleted if they contain less than 60 articles, in order to avoid having a ton of categories with next to no content. He is not suggesting deletion of either articles or stub templates, although he is suggesting renaming one particular stub template since it doesn't use the standard naming format. The templates might be useful, but the categories aren't unless we have a good amount of relevant stub articles to fill them with. So he wants to keep the templates and articles but let more than one template use the same generic category until we have more material. At this point in time, we can begin creating more specific categories. I agree with this analysis, and this has been standard stub sorting practice for a very long time. As for the discrimination thing, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Suriname, Jamaica, the Channel Islands, and many other countries don't have distinct "people stubs" categories either, all due to this convention. On the other hand, I could name at least 20 countries that have been given more specific categories as soon as the material about them grew in size. When the Oceanian material grows, so will the category tree. Valentinian T / C 13:27, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Cometstyles, I take great offense at your unwarranted slur. I am an Oceanian myself, and find it abhorrent that you should accuse me of discrimination with no evidence whatsoever. Please address the facts I present, do not automatically leap to the conclusion that I must have some vendetta against Oceania. Play the ball, not the man. I have actually exercised some leniency as regarding these templates, by suggesting upmerging when deletion would have been a reasonable option in some cases. Are you seriously suggesting that we will soon have 60 stubs for people from Nauru - there are over 150 for Fiji, hence its category - when Nauru has a population of 5800 people? At that rate, proportionately we should have some 60,000,000 bio-stubs worldwide - 40 times more articles than Wikipedia's entire total. Please read the instructions regarding when stub types are required and when they are not, and pull your head in. Grutness...wha?  01:56, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * (reply to Grutness)>> I didnt mean Discrimination but actually bias ( I forgot to change it )..and I also believe in upmerging some of the stubs but clearly upmerging might make it more general. As you can see, I'am from Fiji and I have a couple of friends who are from Samoa and Tonga and I believe its quite rude not have stubs for bio for these countries just because they are too small to be noted as independent. I have added some Samoans to the stub that I have created (42 people) but I didnt do the same for Tonga and PNG  because I knew it would be contested and most probably deleted by people who dont know about it and if you clearly have read what I had written above, you would see that I didnt even mention Nauru anywhere because when I created that stub, I didnt know that there was practically no articles regarding people form Nauru and I knew it would most probably get deleted but I didnt think anyone would try to delete stubs for people from Samoa, Tonga or Papua New Guinea and now I believe for smaller countries such as (Nauru, Solomon,Tahiti, Kiribati, Vanuatu and Wallis-and-Futuna) its better to use the Oceania-bio-stub then stubs for each of their individual countries but that certainly doesnt apply to bigger and more advanced countries such as Samoa, Tonga and Papua New Guinea {well they are developing countries) and I agree with Caerwine< > that each countries should have three stubs mentioned below and I also believe Double Categorising would be a good idea as well...-- Cometstyles 10:59, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, given that that was basically what I was suggesting... upmerging means that, for example Samoa-bio-stub would have and  as its two categories, and would make it easier to split out a separate category when threshold is reached (hopefully not too long, if there are currently 42 stubs). I've been doing exactly that with geography stubs over the last couple of years, and I can see a good case for bio-stubs being done the same way. It is true that you didn't mention Nauru in your argument, but you did create it, and exactly the same arguments relating to the number of current stubs exist for the other categories as do for that one. In terms of categories, having a solid number of stubs is important, for the sake of editors and stub sorters (too many small categories can make finding articles which can be expanded more difficult, and they become a much harder job to maintain, too). That's why a threshold of 60 is set by WP:WSS (as mentioned at WP:STUB). Greetings from New Zealand, BTW. Grutness...wha?  13:28, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Iam going to kick myself for creating a stub for Nauru but I knew it was going to get deleted anyway..a threshold of 60 might be good enough for developed countries but maybe shouldnt apply for smaller countries but I dont think anything could be doneabout it and I just have to wait for someone to "upmerge" the stubs before I can add anymore related articles..Thanks and BTW..Kiaora..Go to sleep..hehe..-- Cometstyles 14:06, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, since no-one's talking about deleting the templates, only changing the categories on them, you can go ahead and use them anyway. That way we will have a clearer idea of whether any of them do get to a reasonable size. Changing the category over simply means changing the code on the template, so it's not like there will need to be huge amounts of re-editing of articles. Grutness...wha?  00:27, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think we may have reached the point where it would make sense to at the least have upmerged main, geo and bio stubs for all 192 UN member states. We have so many of those that it would be easier to not have to keep track of the exceptions to {&#123;Country-stub}}, {&#123;Country-bio-stub}}, and {&#123;Country-geo-stub}} when applying templates. Caerwine Caer’s whines  02:34, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I've been thinking the same about applying the Alai solution more consistently for the generic, -bio, and -geo templates. Around 2 years ago, most countries didn't have specific templates, and Africa was just a giant mess. Today, the material about Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and South America has grown, and most countries now have either two or three templates. The countries "missing" one or more template(s) are mostly confined to Oceania and the Caribbean since this material seems to have slow growth. I guess, one year from now, the last African countries will probably have all three templates, give or take Saint Helena. If we give all countries the three upmerged templates, we should add a note to the code why the specific category doesn't exist to avoid a lot of later cleanup (see e.g. the code I normally use on Croatia-politician-stub). If anybody wishes to see a more complete list of these templates, see my list here for the generics and -bios. Valentinian T / C 09:40, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * FWIW, Saint Helena is likely to have a geo-stub sometime fairly soon, at least (but its parent is UK-Atlantic, not Africa :) I also add a "hidden message" to templates expaining the lack of a category (see Kiribati-geo-stub for instance. Grutness...wha?  13:28, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * What do farmers know about cucumber salad? (Danish proverb) Valentinian T / C 22:30, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Good idea on the note. On a semi-related theme, what I've also been doing recently is adding an additional sort key to upmerged templates when "top-sorting them", so that where there's a group of them in a single category, they appear a) after the "main" template (if any), and b) alphabetically among themselves.  (i.e. I'm using the likes of , where   is upmerged to the same cat as   (which I cat with the more usual  ).  Alai 03:24, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the template's or category's talk page (if any). No further edits should be made to this section.