Wikipedia talk:Stub/Archive 1

how to find or fix a stub
Help: There are over 1000 Wikipedia links to "Find or fix a stub", which now redirect to this page. But this page does not tell you how to find or fix a stub. Tempshill 23:29, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
 * "Finding stubs" section was added, as per request. --Sn0wflake 23:59, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Excellent, thank you. Tempshill 20:56, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Great. And now where's the help for fixing a stub? I'm a n00b at wiki, it would really be helpful.Gray62
 * The whole of the article addresses that. Also, pleas sign your comments with four tildes ( ~ ) --Sn0wflake 01:38, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

Oops, sry. Hmm, obviously, I'm a total doofus, but reading this article I still have a very fuzzy picture of the difference between a 'real ' article and a stub. For instance, should the stub template be removed at some point? And what happens if I remove it? It would be really gr8 if someone would make an article on this that someone not so familiar with wiki could understand. Gray62 14:40, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Catagorizing stubs is much easier if the contributor has at least marked them as {stub} at all, I propose changing the Project page stub directions to let new contributors know that it is better to mark the article {stub} then to not mark it at all Xaosflux 05:09, 12 November 2005 (UTC)


 * When the article no longer qualifies as a stub, the stub tag should be removed. That is why the page says "Once a stub has been properly expanded and becomes an article rather than just a stub, you or any editor may remove the stub tag from it. No admin action or formal permission is needed." Is that unclear? When the stub tag is removed, the article is no longer listed in the stub category, and the stub notice no longer appears at the bottom of the article. DES (talk) 15:07, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

Hmm sry, some misunderstanding here on my part. I'm looking for info how to properly expand a stub. What is the necessary minimum for an article? Checking 'Wikipedia:What is an article' now. Maybe someone could take a look at The Hurricane (1999 movie) and tell me if there's anything missing, pls? Gray62 15:25, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
 * A stub can be expanded by adding any relevant information that is not already present. What that might be depends on the article in question. Basically any article with enough content not to be a stub is an article, albiet perhaps a short one. What it takes to be a "full" or "complete" article is another matter -- for the other extreme, see WP:FAC. One important thing that articels should have but many stubs lack is cited sources. See Cite sources for more on this, and see Footnote3 for one tool some editors use for this purpose. Another thing is a proper category -- pretty much every article should be in at least one category, and the stub category will be removed when the stub tag is removed. Beyon that there are no particualr rules -- the more reliable, relevant, sourced, NPOV content the better, IMO. Happy editing. DES (talk) 15:54, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

removal of images
Where can I find the discussion about the removal of images from various stub templates? Zscout370 (Sound Off) 02:30, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Suspend use of stub icons. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 01:46, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
 * I've added a line discouraging the use of icons at Stub. Grutness...  wha?  13:41, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Stubbing
I considered altering and adding stub tags to articles stubbing. Should we make an article with that name? --SuperDude 15:36, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
 * I didn't quite understand what you meant, but creating such entry would be the same as shooting our own foot, as the intention of this page is reuniting all information about stubs in one place. The term stubbing is somewhat of a neologism, also. That page would be better off redirecting to here. --Sn0wflake 19:57, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
 * That would be a funny irony though...Just H 04:05, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

stub template position
This page says "These stub templates should invariably be placed at the bottom of the article." Is that strictly required? I prefer to put the stub template above headings such as External links or References, and succession boxes or related concept boxes. This way readers will realise the article is incomplete (and consider adding to it) before they get to the "boring" stuff at the bottom of the page. An alternate wording might be These stub templates should be placed at the bottom of the text of the article. --ScottDavis 04:28, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * As things stand, what is said on the article is the rule. Invariably means invariably. However, you might want to bring this discussion up at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting. --Sn0wflake 04:52, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * He took your advice. As Grutness pointed out in that discussion, the stub template basically says "this is all we have, and we need more", implying there's nothing beyond it when in fact there is. --Elembis 13:43, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)
 * I agree with Scott's reasoning - I used to place all my stub msgs above those section, after main body. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 11:28, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Has the policy changed, or did someone unilatterally change it? The page now says, "By convention, these stub templates should be placed near the bottom of the article." Much weaker than "invariably". Stub template placement is something that really does cry out for standardization. I see stub templates all over the place; some look like the last entry in a list of links or references, and do not stand out. Enclosing them in a shaded box might help; centering might help. Finell 05:52, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Boilerplate index
I've added a line pointing at this page to the end of the See Also list @ WP:BPT Courtland 17:35, 2005 Jun 4 (UTC)

Ethno-stub died?
Template:Ethno-stub seems to have disappeared for no good reason I can ascertain...any help? Tomer TALK 04:49, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)
 * For reasons best known to himself, Stevertigo decided to delete the template. It's been restored. Grutness...  wha?  06:36, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanky kindly, good sir. Tomer TALK  08:18, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

Stub
Given that the category is now Category:Stubs, should this page be similarly named? Grutness...  wha?  06:23, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Sounds reasonable, provided appropriate redirects. Tomer TALK  08:17, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

Stubsensor cleanup project
Hello,

Would anyone mind if I added a blurb about the Stubsensor cleanup project (example: User:Triddle/stubsensor/20050516)? Perhaps we can also consolidate and try to come up with good criteria for judging when an article is no longer a stub? Triddle 21:58, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)
 * Hey there, Triddle. Indeed, your Stubsensor would make a nice addition to this page. I will include it right away. Stub size, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely. Our main problem comes from the fact that there isn't much to say about certain subjects and that there is too much to say about others. There are also articles with little content and huge tables/lists which give very little useful information. So the whole discussion becomes a mess most of the time. But please give your opinion on this matter, either here or on the WP:WSS. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 01:36, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Yes indeed it is hard to tell what is a stub and what is not. I've attacked this on two levels: in my software and in the organization of the cleanup projects. I believe the proper solution is proper and good communication. Here is what my take is on the matter: A stub is short enough to contain an interesting point or two but overall does not contain enough detail to be a full article but only if it can be expanded by an average person. If its already reached the level of requiring extensive research or college courses it should probably have the tag put on it and list why. Additionally if the article has glaring omissions it should have the expand tag put on it and list the omissions and how to fix it. The more we can improve the signal to noise ratio on the stub tags I believe the more we can let them do their intended job: make it easy for your average person to improve Wikipedia. Thats just my philosophy though. Triddle 05:09, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)
 * We must be on the right track then, since that's more or less what is already being said on the article, but the expansion tag is something that hadn't been considered so far. The only problem I see is that this would be a great guideline for WP:WSS, but I don't see the average user "getting" the spirit of the idea. --Sn0wflake 17:52, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Rationale for stub types
Please excuse if this is covered somewhere in voluminous texts covering the art of stubbing. I haven't read them all, but it humbly seems to me that this question should have an answer somewhere prominent within the documentation. It seems to me that whether an article is a stub or not is a characteristic orthoginal to its categorization(s) within the "". For the use case of "Show me all stubs in the category 'communications satellites'" (which seems to have been the motivation for stub categories), it seems to me that this would best be handled by the MediaWiki software &mdash; not for it to specifically support the "stub" tag, but generally to support queries involving arbitrary combinations of text content, tags (and absence of tags), and category membership (and for that matter any of the other metadata maintained by the MediaWiki software). Further, it seems to me that the stub hierarchy, and whatever other tag hierarchies are on the horizon (e.g., , etc.) will plunge Wikipedia into a massive infinite-monkey ontological cross product. Thanks. &mdash; Fleminra June 28, 2005 09:41 (UTC)
 * It is absolutely true that the cross-product of label-stub with label-category-X should be sufficient to alert persons to articles that are stubs in their area of interest. However, there is not a way in which these cross-products can be visualized at the category level for a particular article (to the best of my knowledge).  The current visualization tools available in "preferences" are not up to the task.  If advances in the WikiMedia software would address this, for instance adding ability to rank on a scale of 1-to-3 or 1-to-5 the "completeness" of an article and accomodate this as a poll for each article and have the running avg-count and median-count and count-of-voters viewable at the category level, that would make the stub-typing going on here obsolete.  I just today outlined another solution type to potentially allow the eradication of small stubtype categories (thereby allowing true implementation of the 100+ article guideline) in the discussion around deletion of Nickelodeon-stub (see Stub_types_for_deletion).  Still another way to try to reduce the proliferation of stubtypes is by double-stubbing, adding two different stub templates that are orthogonal; where there are many articles that would need double-stubbing, new stubtypes are being created according to area classes, such as geo for geography class, bio for biography class, etc. where a double-stubbed article to Canada-stub and Bio-stub now can go to Canada-bio-stub.  Cross-products are useful but usually only when they are instantiated then then usually when they are only instantiated partially.  Thus, what would be quite useful is to modify the MediaWiki software to all the instantiation of cross-product nodes between stub and category at will from within any particular category, so that a pseudo-category would be created that would be category-x-stub which would not be creatable by a human, but would be created on the fly each time a category is accessed and would appear as a sub-category containing a subset of articles in the real category.  However, in the end the easiest way to do away with the stub-type solution is to have comprehensive coverage of WikiProjects for areas of active interest, those WikiProjects maintaining interest-area lists of articles in need of attention for use by participants in the project.  The primary social reason for the existence of stubtypes is the univeral editing nature of how Wikipedia has grown; the assumption is that anyone walking in off the street who might be interested in an area should find it easy to find a stub in her area of interest ... and the easiest way of accomplishing that to date is via stubtypes.  I hope this goes some way toward addressing your questions.  I'm sure that I've not related all options or considerations here, in which case others adding to this is necessary to give you the whole picture. Courtland July 1, 2005 00:00 (UTC)

Request
Can the page have a few "links outwards" (especially for those of us coming from the Community portal page, who want to be helpful and find a few stubs to cure).
 * I don't think I understand what you mean. Could you try elaborating a little? --Sn0wflake 1 July 2005 00:36 (UTC)

--I think what he means it can you list all of the stub articles.--