Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-02-13/WikiProject report

This week's subject, WikiProject Stub Sorting, was started in November 2004 with the intention of organizing and categorizing stubs and stub categories. The project's 267 participants use a vast array of categories, celebrate the discovery of new categories, and discuss the deletion of unnecessary ones. The project maintains a field guide for stub sorters, to-do list, and handbook on naming conventions. We interviewed Grutness and PamD.

'''Sorting articles sounds like a mundane task. Why do you do it? What motivates so many Wikipedians to join WikiProject Stub Sorting?'''


 * Grutness: A lot of Wikipedians seem to prefer the idea that they can do small amounts to help the articles – that's the reason there are so many projects and task-forces related to the behind-the-scenes work of Wikipedia. Even if you haven't a huge amount to add to a specific topic (not everyone is an expert in some obscure or arcane subject), you can still help to improve the encyclopedia. Stub sorting is attractive because it helps other editors to facilitate the expert addition of information to articles by making those articles more easily found. It's a lubrication and liaison process really between article and expert.


 * PamD: It's a useful job to do, to help subject experts get access to the stubs in their areas for further development. And it becomes a challenge: "There must be an appropriate stub type out there...", and the other challenge of "Let's get Category:Stubs emptied. (Though sometimes, if an editor has had a stub-creation frenzy and produced a mass of stubs I don't find interesting, I'll give up and just clear out one particular letter of the alphabet as my particular patch.) It introduces you to articles (OK, stubs) on a wide range of topics, broadens the horizons. I tend to do a lot more than just stub-sort: where appropriate I add DEFAULTSORT, unref, coord missing, and sometimes I will sort out formatting, grammar, add links, etc if the article seems worthwhile but is struggling. Sometimes I create missing redirects from alternative titles given in the article if they're missing. So as well as stub-sorting I do a fair bit of cleanup and wikification. I also check that if a stub has a disambiguated title it's got the appropriate link from a dab page or hatnote – or move it to the correct title if it doesn't need disambiguated. It's all very WikiGnomish: tinkering around usefully and satisfyingly.

'''Why do stubs deserve special attention? How does proper categorization benefit stubs and the encyclopedia as a whole?'''


 * Grutness: Stubs deserve special attention for several reasons, not least of all simply because they are stubs – they're areas where there is a clear lack of information of a subject, so they're areas where the encyclopedia needs work. They're also – let's face it – a little embarrassing. You get a newbie checking out a random article on Wikipedia and they come across one sentence on a subject – it doesn't put the project as a whole in the best light. Categorisation, as explained above, is vital to the process of getting stub articles to editors who are interested in specific subject areas.

'''The project's talk page receives new posts on a daily basis. What sort of discussions attract editors to the project's talk page? Describe the community that keeps this project going.'''


 * Grutness: I'm not sure what kind of editor is attracted to stub sorting – maybe obsessives and neat freaks! But any large body of information needs organisation (imagine an encyclopedia with no form of indexing or cross-referencing!) and there are people who realise the importance of such a task. One group of editors who are naturally drawn to stub discussions is those associated with the specific subject area, and as such WP:SS tries to liaise with other WikiProjects on a regular basis. Let's face it, splitting a subject's stub category into smaller categories often requires arcane information about specific subjects, information far more readily available to people who are experts in their field. While some subjects are easy to split (It's pretty easy to split a category for African politicians by country, for instance), others require a lot more expertise, and that's where outside help for other projects comes in. So there's generally discussion from a hard core of stub sorters and visitors from subject-specific topics.

'''Amid the vast variety of stub categories, how do you determine which categories to use for a stub? Have there been any efforts to educate editors on how to select categories for stub articles? Do you foresee the number of categories increasing or decreasing in the future?'''


 * Grutness: Again, liaison with other projects makes some of this task easier, and the gradual splitting of oversized stub types into more specific stub types reduces the number of stubs that an article will get (to use the same example as above, whereas a stub may have been marked as both an African politician stub and a Ghanaian biography stub, it can not be marked simply as a Ghanaian politician stub). In general, there is a very rough hierarchy of which stubs should go on an article, but in most cases we're guided by the exact nature of the article itself. I'd see the number of categories and stub types as continuing to expand as long as the number of stubs expands – we try to keep the number of articles in individual stub categories to a specific range, a sort of "sweet spot" of between about 60 and 600 articles, which tends to make the search for editable stubs easier for editors working in a specific subject area. So as the number of stubs expands, the number of categories does too.


 * PamD: Quite often I know the stub type anyway from experience; sometimes I go to that huge hierarchy and move downwards; sometimes I find a relevant category and move upwards until I find a category which has a stubs subcategory (and sometimes I then add extra links in that hierarchy where the stub category wasn't a child category of the best matching category). Some stubs don't have much content, and I'll often explore to find out more information on the topic (e.g. which country it's in, where the stub says "X is a village near Y" and not much more) to get it stub-sorted as closely as possible.

'''When working with stubs, how often do you come across articles about non-notable subjects, promotional material, and other examples of what Wikipedia is not? Does your effort to sort stubs benefit other stub-related projects?'''


 * Grutness: Well, it definitely benefits subject-specific wikiprojects, so yes from that point of view. But yeah, while the principal aim of stub sorting is to sort stubs, naturally, a lot of stub sorters combine that work with adding other cleanup templates or activities such as WP:prodding and WP:AFDing. A lot of new stubs in particular (those which are simply marked with stub rather than a subject-specific stub type) are likely deletion candidates that have slipped through the new pages patrol.


 * PamD: Yes, I'll sometimes Speedy or PROD a stub, as well as stub-sorting it (even it seems a clear CSD I'll sort the stub to get it out of the unsorted stubs category and save the time of the other stub-sorters).

'''What are WikiProject Stub Sorting's most urgent needs? How can a new member help today?'''


 * Grutness: There are always over-sized categories which need looking at to see whether there's any possible split that can be proposed, and there are always new stubs coming in that need sorting into their specific subject types. And given the hierarchy of stub types, even the newest of stub sorters can quickly learn a handful of stub templates that will help them move stubs further up the hierarchy (e.g., sorting bio-stubs or geo-stubs by nationality or country is as simple as adding "CountryName-" to the front of a stub tag and is a big help). It does take a little while to get a feel for the ways in which new stub type proposals are made, but it's not so esoteric that it can't be picked up by anyone fairly quickly, so I'd recommend anyone interested in joining WPSS to start by doing some simple sorting and lurk on the proposals page for a short while – it should give them a fair idea of what goes on, and it won't be long before they find themselves joining in with the discussions and proposals.

Anything else you'd like to add?


 * Grutness: One thing that people do tend to complain about with stub-sorting is the axes on which stubs are split, which often seem a little counterintuitive to individual subject WikiProjects. There are reasons for this – usually to try to make stub types as uniform as possible across the whole of Wikipedia (something which is a major aim of WPSS and does occasionally bring its members into conflict with other editors. There are several useful essays and subpages in which try to explain some of the less obvious things which happen in stub-sorting, and they're well worth looking at, by prospective stubsorters and non-stubsorters alike.


 * Hope that helps! I should note that I am no longer nearly as active within WPSS as I once was, but unless things have drastically changed at the project in the last two or three months, most of the information is still accurate.


 * PamD: A couple of small pleas to editors adding stub to articles:
 * Remember it goes at the end after everything except inter-language links (per WP:FOOTERS) – if you put it in the right place first it's easier to find it and saves us having to move it.
 * Please don't capitalise the "S" in stub – it saves a few keystrokes if it's already lower-case when we're changing it to (multiply it by the number of stubs – quite a lot of keystrokes). Thanks.

Next week, we'll head to the phoenix city to see a country that has risen from the ashes of war time after time. Until then, sing Mazurek Dąbrowskiego in the archive.