Wikipedia talk:Stub/Archive 5

Double-stubbing rewrite
I've changed the "strongly discouraged" stuff, as per my comments above of many months ago, and basically every discussion I've had on WSS on the topic. Obviously we don't want to encourage the Ambrosius Stub sextuple-stubbing treatment, but surely it's better to advise people what to do (indicate primary notability, and in the case of people and such like, nationality), rather than giving stern admonitions on what not to do. Alai 07:00, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Coding of stub templates
What level of significance attaches to the precise coding of stub templates? Personally I'm happy to do ye olde cut'n'paste of some other stub template and modify as required, but I've been noticing increasing incidence of templates coded entirely differently, for example as tables, with none of the html tag stuff prescribed by this page. Does that ultimately matter, or is this just down to nuances of visual appearance, and preferences thereon? Alai 21:34, 6 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I think perhaps tables have been used at some point in order to get long text to not wrap under an image being used, which can look a little unpleasant.


 * Using just a single div:

''Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.''


 * Using a table with two cells:


 * It could of course be argued that a stub notice shouldn't be long enough for wrapping to be an issue ...
 * Anyway, I think that as long as the outermost div maintains the  (and possibly  ) and visibly they appear the same, then it doesn't matter how the internals are coded. --TheParanoidOne 09:47, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
 * That does appear to be the rationale. It's hard to guarantee no wrapping, since a large image (or small screen, or large font size) could cause it even where the text isn't "normally" a whole line long.  But what if they don't, e.g. like this?  I've noticed a number changed in this manner, and they seem to interact strangely with the "normal" kind as regards vertical spacing, other than that I have Not Clue One.  Alai 00:24, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I've been using to make the text line up nicely, viz: ''Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.'' Not a table, and it doesn't center the image vertically, but very simple, give it a try. &hearts; Her Pegship &hearts; 19:45, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Definition of stub
This article doesn't define what a stub is, when it should be tagged, and when it could be untagged, making it fairly useless. I'd hate to think it was stub also. Gene Ward Smith 20:42, 14 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Oh, irony. You're everywhere today. Just H 04:25, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Stub positioning decision
This has been brought up before, but never resolved: We need to come to some consensus on where stub templates should be located, for the sake of consistency. Some articles have stub categories first, others last. Personally, I have an opinion on the matter, but I don't even care &mdash; just as long as we can agree on something. ~ Booyabazooka 00:31, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Why does it matter? I rather thought that SPUI was only editing the text to get that "less important" poke in:  is there an on-going bunfight about the order?  I'd think that this is in theory a MoS matter, as it goes to overall formatting of the whole article, rather than just the stub-tags in isolation.  Alai 22:21, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
 * There is no great stub-location war, but SPUI and I were just at odds on the matter, and I'm hoping we can decide on an answer. ~ Booya Bazooka 22:43, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
 * They should definitely go last. As stub places are left in place in tens of thousands of perfectly good little articles they are always going to be with us in vast numbers, but they are much less useful to the reader than the "real" categories.

Stubbing is out of control
Stubbing is completely out of control. Tens of thousands of perfectly good articles are labelled as stubs, whereas so far as I can see the concept was originally intended to apply to articles so inadequate as to be almost useless in their present form. Most of the articles in Encyclopedia Britannica would probably be labelled as stubs in Wikipedia. Does that mean that they should be removed from the next edition? Often you see articles which are in a stub category, but not a "real" category. I think this shows a poor sense of priorities. A vast amount of time must be spent on stubbing, but when there are hundreds of thousands of them clearing them is not a viable project, and there are so many of them (and so many of those aren't really that bad) that they aren't even of much use in identifying articles to work on in a specific field. I would like to suggest that people should stop participating in the stub system and focus their efforts on improving wikipedia in other ways. Golfcam 12:51, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
 * You can always unstub them... Just H 04:14, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

False dichotomy
Most articles tagged "stub" are very much "real" articles in my opinion. I think the rigid distinction between "stub" and "article" is false. Britannica makes no such distinction. It doesn't say, "Our Macropaedia is an encyclopedia is full of real articles, but the stuff in Micropaedia isn't articles", but most of the Micropaedia articles would rapidly attract "stub" notices if posted in Wikipedia. Frankly, I think that stating that stubs are NOT articles, is offensive to all the people who write perfectly decent short articles, which get stubbed. The guideline says that stubs are usually three to ten short sentences, but vast numbers of them are longer than that, and people are far too slow to remove the tag. We really shouldn't be telling people who have written a good 800 word article that it isn't really an "article" at all, but something of much less value. Golfcam 13:02, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Britannica doesn't make that distinction probably because if somebody who worked for them wrote an article as small as some of these stubs, they'd be fired. You can't fire the editors here, you can only block them, and if you block people who make small articles, there'd be more people blocked than unblocked. Just H 04:15, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Also, to the best of my knowledge, there is no facility where anyone can edit an article on britannica. Stubs are articles which can be expanded to become more complete articles. Why would EB signal that an article requires further editing by its readers when there is no way they can? In any case, a stub template doesn't say "this isn't an article" - it says "this article could use some work". And as such, it's no different to any of the other diozens of different types of cleanup articles on wikipedia. Grutness...wha?  09:00, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Before or after category?
Should the stub be placed before or after the category? I always place it before the category, but bots often move it and place it after the category. I feel it should be before the category. How should it be? And I think it would be good if there was an unified way that all followed... -- Frap 12:52, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't think many of the "stub regulars" greatly care either way, though apparently some of the stub detractors do, given a couple of the comments earlier on this page (in synopsis, "stubs suck, therefore put them last"). Perhaps ask at Categorisation, since one might argue it's in effect a special case of the issue of what order to place categories in, in general.  Alai 19:55, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I'd prefer to put categories right before interwiki links. It really doesnt matter where you put categories. It is recomended however to put categories after everything but interwiki links. Any change to categories will be much easier to impliment. -- Cat out 15:44, 25 July 2006 (UTC)


 * My personal opinion is that since stubs are part of the article text, and not in the footers or sidebars, they should be above the categories. When I brought this issue up at WP:AWB, however, their response was basically 'we've already made up our mind, so quit bothering us'. It sounded like they were definately in the stub-hater camp. BlankVerse 09:21, 1 January 2007 (UTC)


 * This is one of the reasons I do not like using AWB. Sure, it's fast and efficient, but I moving the stubs back up above the categories (where I, too, feel they belong) is a pain. My logic is simple: since they appear on the page prior to the categories (which always appear at the bottom), then they should logically appear first within the source of the page. On the other hand, after a couple thousand edits, my level of tolerance has grown considerably, and now I rarely bat an eye at a stub template in either location, let alone do I bother to move them around. But, I always add new ones above the categories and interwikilinks, but after the last part of the text (including other types of links). -- Willscrlt (  Talk &middot; Cntrb  ) 07:45, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Question on Apperance of Triple Stubs
Topic says it all, in Siege of Faenza the three stubs make the page ugly. Should they be split, or sectioned off? Thoughts?

Wslack 20:02, 15 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I would say that the Gemany-related and Italy-related stub notices are not needed. The stub is not about Germany or Italy. It is about a historical battle. --  Donald Albury ( Talk )  21:12, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Agreed, and done. --TheParanoidOne 22:13, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree. Stub-tagging isn't about the beautification of one-line articles, it's about maximising the chances of them being expanded. Battles, strangely enough, often involve two (or more) countries, and thus can very readily be tagged with three stub templates (battle-stub, and a country-stub or country-hist-stub). Had every triple-stubbed battle article been de-tagged in the way that's happened here, we'd now have a single unmanageably large category (or at any rate, splitting it would have been made more troublesome), without further differentiation. While there are obviously many editors with some sort of interesting in editing battle-related articles, I don't think that's the only axis they're likely to be expanded on. Alai 00:06, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
 * My question was more on asthetics then whether the stub sshould be there. They look unprofessional. What if one stub catagory was visible with a picture, and the otehrs remain only as catagories? Is that possible? --Wslack 00:11, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I have no objection to that, but I don't think it's likely to become standard practice, as it would be highly inconvenient to implement on a wide scale. I repeat my earlier answer:  aethetics, and a pretense at "professionalism" are besides the point, when what we're dealing with is a manifestly incomplete article.  If making such articles look ugly encourages people to do something about the missing content, so much the better.  Now, having said all that (again)...  I did make a proposal here for using existing stub types, but tidying up their appearance somewhat, for such cases.  Mind you, a lot of it is caused simply by the use of inappropriately large images in the templates.  Alai 05:28, 17 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I would question most strongly the Germany-history-stub. This was not a battle in a German-Italian war. This was a battle between the Emperor and one of his subject states. The Empire does not equate to Germany. --  Donald Albury ( Talk )  11:49, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, but the Germany-hist-stub is linked to History of Germany, and at least this article includes the time-span mentioned in this battle-stub. Mind, I don't want to start a discussion about what is Germany (we've had those before), but the pertaining hist-stubs for Germany and Italy wouldn't be wrong in ways of getting attention to the stub. Lectonar 11:57, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Lists of stats
Many stubs have lengthy lists of stats for certain athletes and events, but not much else other information. Is this a stub? --Lunar Jesters (talk) 00:47, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
 * IMO, yes: if there's three sentences of article body, and 5K of wikimarkup, stats, filmography, publication list, etc, I'd consider that to be a stub.  OTOH, if a given wikiproject has decided that that's a complete article for their purposes (a lot of album articles seem to be that way), or it's evidently scoped to be essentially just a "list article", then it may not be.  Alai 01:17, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much, I will take these comments into consideration. --Lunar Jesters (talk) 01:21, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Concern over this guideline: Wikipedia:Notability (fiction)
I think Notability (fiction) guideline is discouraging stubs and now is being used primarily to mass merge/delete stub articles and hence is a violating this (Wikipedia:Stub) policy.

Please see Wikipedia talk:Notability (fiction) for discussion.

-- Cat out 11:35, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

This was confusing and not at all helpful