Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Archive 2

Script-running request
The following is copied from WP:HD: I don't know how to go about running a script or bot on Wikipedia, and don't want to start figuring out how. But I've found something that needs a bot/script1 to be run. So I'm requesting that it be done (see next paragraph). Thanks much! If this is wrong place to ask, someone please direct me to the right place, and I'll repost this there; thanks.
 * Any article that includes   and also includes    should be modified as follows:
 * * If the article is in Category:Hebrew Bible/Tanakh or any of its subcategories, then should be replaced with   .
 * * If the article is not in Category:Hebrew Bible/Tanakh or any of its subcategories, but is in Category:Christianity or any of its subcategories, then should be replaced with   .
 * This won't be perfect, but will be almost perfect. As it is, there are quite a few article that include both and.

1  I don't know whether there's a difference between a bot and a script on Wikipedia, so I'm using both terms. &mdash;msh210 18:52, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Bots (which is what you want in this case) are described at Bots. I count around 300 uses of that template - frankly that's probably below the point at which using a bot (writing it, getting it approved, and babysitting it while it runs) would be the more efficient strategy.  I'd probably take a hefty intake of breath and start doing it by hand (I did several hundred Gray's Anatomy images last month, using Firefox's tabbed browsing to help).  Bot or not, I'd wait until wikipedia isn't running so slowly. -- John Fader 19:46, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, actually, it's more than 300 articles, as one can actually change to  based on category. But I am moving this discussion to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting; please continue it there (if at all).   &mdash;msh210 04:07, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

As long as the stub is sorted correctly, I have no personal objections at this time. However, there may be a cause for restructuring of the stub sorting project, using full name stubs rather than their abbreviated short forms. -- AllyUnion (talk) 09:12, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't see why there would need to be such a restructuring. The bot can run as follows (I'm using my own made-up pseudocode), with perhaps a lookup table:

IF article hasn't THEN move to the next article. ENDIF IF article is in Category:Hebrew Bible/Tanakh THEN ->  ELSE IF article is in Category:Minerals THEN ->  ELSE IF article is in ...
 * and new lines can be added to the bottom of this list as desired, with the bot running constantly (or periodically, however these things work on Wikipedia).


 * Note that this would assign a single "stub" to each stub; if an article is in two categories, it'll assign the one nearer the top of the lookup table or instructions. (I don't know programming; I'm assuming this can be done so it works as I described.)  &mdash;msh210 01:57, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * No, there was a discussion on whether all the NAME-stub should be renamed. -- AllyUnion (talk) 10:01, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Edit summary
I use the following edit summary:  Stub-sorting. You can help! . I see YUL89YYZ uses Sort the stub and Ssd, Edward, Alsocal, Grendelkhan and Viriditas use  [foo]-stub . Another I've seen is:  stub -> [foo]-stub . What do you all use? If everyone posts his own, then we can all get good ideas.

Incidentally, I assume stub-sorts should be marked as minor, and have been doing so. Do you all agree?  &mdash;msh210 01:45, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * I've been using "sort stub", and minor, when I've come across them. &mdash;Korath (Talk)


 * I mark it with the name of the stub template, the same as I would for tagging a category with cfd or for that matter, marking it a generic stub. ("Stub" is usually sufficiently explanatory, as is "cfd".) This is more problematic with templates that are not obvious template names. (For example, "tolkienstub" and "geo-stub" are fairly obvious, but "PBS stub" is apparently a bit confusing.) -Aranel (" Sarah ") 21:15, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * I use use more specific stub-tag foo-stub. grendel|khan 17:21, 2005 Feb 7 (UTC)

Where do you put stub tags?
Now that placing the stub tag after categories will cause the stub category to show up last (instead of template categories always going first), where do you put it? I'm inclined to favor putting the stub tags at the end, since the stub category is usually the least important to the contents of the article. Is there any policy on this yet? -Aranel (" Sarah ") 21:26, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Traditionally, it IS suppose to be at the end of the article. That way, it is not disruptive to the article. -- AllyUnion (talk) 07:10, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Category/stub ordering is a no-win situation. The stub category should come last in the category list, but placing the stub tag after categories produces excessive ugly whitespace visible in the article itself (e.g. see Otto August Rosenberger). &mdash;Korath (Talk) 08:04, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)


 * You could do this: -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:07, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * I like that solution, thanks. Courtland 02:24, 2005 Feb 13 (UTC)
 * ...but someone else doesn't -- see User_talk:Ceyockey Courtland 18:51, 2005 Feb 13 (UTC)

You're right I don't like it. I separate categories one-per-line whenever I see them and so does any bot I hear. You lose a lot of ease in maintainability to......save some whitespace? No thanks. Each change of a page creates a diff. The diff engine used for wikipedia isn't that smart and only looks at lines. So a change on a line requires the diff to include the old and new line in the diff. This is why I break paragraphs into one sentence per line; categories one per line; and interwiki links one per line and there's no presentable difference.

So this condensing pretty much goes against the thousands of articles I've seen and the only good reason you have is to save some whitespace. If anything, you should get the wiki code changed to not put in the whitespace instead.

As for stub location: I guess I don't see it as worth squabbling over. Stubs are the temporary item and the more time spent on it means the less time you spend on making articles non-stub. Cburnett 19:06, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

"pi" image in Template:Math-stub
There is some debate over the use of a "pi" image in Template:Math-stub; there's small edit war going on. Please see Template talk:Math-stub if you care to voice an opinion. (Please do not discuss this here; discuss it there; thanks.)  &mdash;msh210 04:47, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Finding stubs to sort
For those of us (e.g., myself) who spend time going through lists of stubs and sorting them, there are essentially two ways I've found of doing so:
 * going through the list at Whatlinkshere/Template:Stub;
 * going through the list at Category:Stub.

For those who prefer the latter, but get bored with the beginning of the alphabet (well, symbols, actually) that's depicted at the page Category:Stub, I've made a little template that you can use to go to stubs that start with, e.g., the letter F. It's at User:msh210/catstub and can be included in any page by using  . E.g., I've done so on User:msh210.


 * If there's broad interest in this, which I doubt, we can move it so it's a subpage of here; e.g., to Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Cat:Stub broken down by initial letter.  &mdash;msh210 19:47, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * I have also found Google to be a useful tool for finding stubs. (It won't find all of the stubs for a particular category, but it will find some of them.) Do a site search (en.wikipedia.edu) with some key words + "stub" (or "this article is the stub" or the text of a specific stub). This will usually help you to find enough to figure out what other key words you might want to look up. -Aranel (" Sarah ") 21:18, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * There is a problem with using Category:Stub. Because that category grew to be so huge that is caused major system performance problems, the connection between Template:Stub and Category:Stub was removed, so many of the Wikipedia articles that have the stub template are NOT in the stub category. The only was to find them is to do a site-search at Google or some other search engine (which will find all those articles except the ones created after the last time Google spider the Wikipedia website). Instead of just searching on "stub", it is probably better to use "This article is a stub". Here is the URL for a Google site-search which finds "about 21,300" webpages.  BlankVerse  &empty;  13:44, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * That might be so, but there are still plenty of stubs present that are real and in need of sorting in the Category:Stub bin. A way I've found recently that leads to targeted stubbing is to follow live wikilinks from stubs ... about half of the stubs I categorized yesterday were found by link following, and some of those were not stubbed but should have been.  The categorical lists added via templates are also useful; for instance, the Template:Places in Singapore ... I only made it through the 1st 1/3rd of this listing and found that many should be stubbed or are already and are in need of categorization.  Courtland 12:43, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)


 * From the Village Pump: Stub Finder.

Archiving
I archived some old or irrelevant material. While I think some more could be archived, I decided to leave it at that. How about we separate all discussion of hierarchy/creation/deletion of stub categories to WikiProject Stub sorting/organization or some similarly named page?--Circeus 21:49, Feb 1, 2005 (UTC)


 * The Criteria page was supposed to be used for that purpose. -- AllyUnion (talk) 11:59, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * I shall move it to there (or to the talk page?). The sooner a final hierarchy is decided upon, the sooner we can really start working. --Circeus 18:36, Feb 2, 2005 (UTC)


 * Done. also moved new/deleted stub discussions.

Getting the subcategories right
I know that it's probably individuals not connected to this group, but I'm getting annoyed with people working their way through the stub category and putting things into seemingly random subcategories. I've just gone through today's additions to the geography stubs which had been moved from general stubs, and found (among otherws) a series of books, a prehistoric tribe, a police force, and a biography of a mathematician. Sorting into the wrong category is just making this job harder - please be careful how you recategorise things! Grutness|hello? 05:11, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * And today, an advertising slogan for an anti-litter campaign. Sigh. Grutness|hello? [[Image:Grutness.jpg|25px|]] 07:36, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Stub sorting
I must admit that I started to move sorting through the Category:stub yesterday (and hope I wasn't the one who did this above, but if I was, sorry about that), but I'm getting confused about the sometimes haphazardly tagging of the stubs, too; I found 3 or 4 articles which were stubbed in 4 categories. Is this common policy, or does one just choose the most appropriate one Lectonar 08:56, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Don't think you were, offhand... Can't speak for others, but I often use more than one stub, although four would be excessive. For instance, a mountain range along the Polish/Czech border might conceivably get a a Poland-geo-stub and a Czechia-geo-stub, or someone who was both a mathematician and astronomer might bet two stubs. With 90% of articles one stub message will probably automatically seem the most likely. Troubvle is there are now so many categories (but given the number of articles, they're all needed, and there will probably need to be more soon, too). Grutness|hello? [[Image:Grutness.jpg|25px|]] 09:21, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Stub sorting script
I've made a script that helps with my stub sorting and I thought I'd share: User:Jag123/StubScript.js. It only works when the page has an existing stub, and is being edited. It adds a link in the toolbox section (What Links Here, Related Changes, etc) on the left. When you click on this link, it shows a list of stubs (which you can define). Once you click on a list item, it automatically changes the existing stub tag in the article to the new stub tag, adds the summary (which you can define), selects minor edit (can be turned off/on) and "clicks" save page (can be turned off/on). I've only tried it with IE6 and monobook skin. --jag123 13:41, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * An how do we implement this? Onco p53 00:49, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Copy it to User:YourName/monobook.js (if you're using the monobook skin). --jag123 01:09, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * I tried it but it only works in IE not mozilla, but it does work very well. Onco p53 01:28, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

What Stubs Are
I'm on something of a solo crusade to remove stub tags from articles that aren't stubs. And I thought that it would make my life easiest if I asked for your help. When you are sorting stubs, please try to untag things that are merely "short articles" and not stubs, remembering that a stub is hardly ever more than a paragraph and very often only one or two sentences. If it's not a stub, don't tag it. It'll make everybody's life easier. :) Snowspinner 13:31, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)
 * Yes, but let's keep in mind that stubs can be long. I recently did a stub that was basically a couple of sentences and a list.  Long, but needed a stub tag, I thought.
 * And while we're on the subject, what about articles that are stubs by virtue of the fact that the subject matter is so huge that outlining it or tackling one facet really doesn't form an article--stub or no stub?
 * Quill 21:15, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * There seems to be a simplistic way of looking at stubs that says short=stub, long=no stub. Yet you can get quite long articles that are still definitely stubs because they don't cover many aspects of a subject. Take Dhaka for instance. Several paragraphs long, but nowhere near enough of an article for one of the world's biggest cities. On the other hand, you can get a far shorter article that says everything very succinctly in a couple of short paragraphs, like the far shorter Chimes_of_Freedom:_The_Politics_of_Bob_Dylan%27s_Art. Personally, I'm also of the opinion that every article should have at least one category code, and if it doesn't it is de jure a stub, irrespective of length (of course, in those cases, it's far better to find a suitable category for it than add a stub template) Grutness|hello? [[Image:Grutness.jpg|25px|]] 03:07, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * This is my exact issue, actually - an article that needs expansion is not necessarily a stub, and a stub does not necessarily need expansion. Something being a permastub is very often a reason for deletion or merging into something else. But in any case, the two categories are very different things. Snowspinner 21:54, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
 * Windscreen wiper is a good example I think. This was stubbed, but the stub had been applied when it was 2 or 3 lines long; now the article has significant (though not comprehensive) information, and I removed the stub the other day.  I guess this would be a test case for "should this be stubbed or not".  What do you think ... should I revert my stub-removal, or leave it "de-stubbed"?  Courtland 23:01, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)
 * I would definitely not consider that article a stub. -Aranel (" Sarah ") 23:05, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Me neither. Looks pretty comprehensive. mIt's worth remembering that we do have a Template:Sect-stub for use when the aticle is long but one section needs work (I'd be tempted to put that on the history section here, but it would be a borderline case). Grutness|hello? [[Image:Grutness.jpg|25px|]] 00:12, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Working with Wikiprojects, etc.
Although it would make the above table of the Science stubs too wide, it would be nice to have some way of noting which stubs match up with which WikiProjects.

Keeping with the idea of WikiProjects (along with the Regional notice boards, etc.): When there are any proposed additions or deletions of topic stubs, there should probably be a note added to the Talk page for any appropriate WikiProjects. For existing and newly created stubs, the appropriate topic stubs should be mentioned on the WikiProject's or Regional notice board's main page. Since most of them follow a similiar format, there should be some standardized format and location for adding stub information to a WikiProject page. BlankVerse 06:36, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * It turns out that one of the Regional notice boards has already added a section for the appropriate stubs to their main page. Take a look at Notice board for India-related topics. BlankVerse <font color=#2554C7> <font color=#F660AB>&empty;  14:01, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Two of them at least - I can remember adding the Africa-geo-stub to the Africa WikiProject page after finding out that the Africa-stub was already listed there. Grutness|hello? [[Image:Grutness.jpg|25px|]] 12:57, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Stubs currently on tfd/cfd
In line with the suggested policies, here is information on the three stubs currently on Templates/Categories for deletion: Grutness|hello? 12:19, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Template:us-geo-stub. This is a duplicate of the well-used template US-geo-stub that was accidentally created by a user who did not know about the latter template. The category is empty and the likely outcome is a delete for that and either a delete or redirect for the template.
 * Template:Car-stub. Another (if slightly more useful) duplicate. The template now redirects to Auto-stub, and the accompanying category looks likely to be deleted.
 * Template:City-stub. Largely redundant now that geography stubs go primarily to country/region subcategories. Only about a dozen articles used this stub, many of which were not cities (most of which were in Brazil for some reason - they now have Brazil-geo-stubs instead). The category is now empty, and the votes so far have all been for delete.

Updated science stub census
The table here includes information provided previously by gK and Jag123. Courtland 11:02, 2005 Feb 9 (UTC) Others providing input: msh210; BlankVerse.