Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Archive 3

Meta-templates?
User:Netoholic has decided to attack the use of Meta-templates&mdash;see Meta-templates considered harmful and Template talk:MetaPicstub. I'm almost a little surprised that he hasn't put Template:MetaPicstub and Template:Metastub up for deletion at WP:TFD. BlankVerse 17:53, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * He can't. The stub templates would need to be changed prior before deletion.  And it was not my idea to use meta templates anyway. -- AllyUnion (talk) 09:23, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Why do you use the term "attack"? I documented (along with the help of the main Wikipedia database developer) some serious problems with using meta-templates. That is not an "attack".  -- Netoholic @ 17:53, 2005 Feb 6 (UTC)


 * I specifically used the term "attack" because it looked like Netoholic was trying to create policy without creating consensus first, and doing it without informing any of the groups, such as the Stub-sorting WikiProject, that would be most affected by any decisions that were made. BlankVerse 08:39, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Are lists the only alternative? Obviously, making full-fledged articles is not practical in this case. Would it be possible for someone to execute a query to copy existing stubs into seperate lists (one for each stub template)? If so, I suppose the removal of each stub template from articles can be done programmatically? --jag123 18:05, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * No, the issue here is that the metastub template is considered harmful and needs to be removed from all stub templates. -- AllyUnion (talk) 12:22, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

There are some interesting points being made in this debate that the Stub-sorting WikiProject should be aware of. Unfortunately, the debate has become fragmented. To follow the discussion, you need to check Wikipedia talk:Meta-templates considered harmful, Template talk:MetaPicstub, and Template talk:Sisterproject, along with Templates_for_deletion/Log/Not_deleted.

User:Jamesday, one of the Wikipedia developers, has made some interesting points about the problems with the use of meta-templates because of the hit on system performance after any edits of the meta-templates. I also thought Netoholic's idea of possibly having a checkbox to identify stubs was interesting, but I would like to hear from one of the developers on how easy that would be to add that feature to the WikiMedia software. Combining a stub checkbox along with using stub categories might be a good way to handle topic stubs. We should also try to consider the downside of such a technique (like possibly ending up back at the problem of the HUGE Category:stub, which was also a huge performance hit, so it had to be disabled).

It is a shame this discussion didn't happen before the recent huge increase in the number of topic stubs. If the final decision is to quit using the stub meta-templates, that would require a large number of rewrites, although I imagine if someone was adept at using regular expressions, they might be able to create something that could do the rewrites fairly easily. BlankVerse 08:39, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Deletion of useless stubs
I am proposing a new deletion policy in order to help the project out for the immediate deletion of useless stubs. See: Deletion of useless stub templates and stub categories. -- AllyUnion (talk) 06:16, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * several have already been put on Templates for deletion, which is the normal way of doing this sort of thing, isn't it? I put Template:City-stub on there today myself (which is redundant and empty since geography stubs got split into regions). Grutness|hello? [[Image:Grutness.jpg|25px|]] 06:21, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

a radical suggestion
I have what I admit is a radical suggestion. Please don't immediately reject it: think about it.

How about having a new template (for the purposes of this discussion, I'll call it ) look like this:
 * This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by [ expanding it].

(i.e., precisely like does now, but without the categorization into Category:Stub). Then let look like this:
 * category:stub

And let all the -stub templates (except those used by WikiProjects) look like this (as an example I'm using oceanography):

Finally, have another template (which I'll call ) look like this:
 * This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by [ expanding it]. See for more details on how to do so.

And have WikiProject-related stub templates look like this (as an example I'm using bird):

&mdash;msh210 19:05, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Put back pics pics. I believe quite a few people would be upset of losing these (often cool and appropriate, I must admit) pictures.--Circeus 19:12, Feb 8, 2005 (UTC)

Well, that's sorta my point. This idea would get rid of any picture specific to the stub category, yes, and, moreover, any text specific to the stub category. The only thing that would remain would be standard text, a standard pic (let's say), and the specific [[Category: ]] tag. Now, before anyone asks "why do this", let me list some reasons: And there are probably other good reasons that I can't think of at the moment.  &mdash;msh210 19:21, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * uniformity (if that's a reason in itself, which many will argue it's not)
 * less distracting (no picture, nothing to read that the person hasn't seen beofre on other pages)
 * more clear that the notice is a stub notice (cf. an old version of maths-stub, which someone might think isn't a stub notice at all)
 * easier to make new stub templates
 * easier to edit all the stub templates at once (because a template is being used)

And then, if one felt that an article belonged in two categories, he could simply use

(for example).  &mdash;msh210 20:07, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

In fact, this will obviate the need for new templates; one can simply use with  can turn into a list of categories.)   &mdash;msh210 20:07, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Changing the stub template is dangerous. You do know that right?  Performance issues because of changing the overly used stub template may cause the Wikipedia to suffer some kind of overload, possibly a DOS attack.  I'm not certain if the server can handle the strain. -- AllyUnion (talk) 01:20, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Don't like it. I admit I'm biased, having had the enjoyment(?) of creating pictures for stubs, but it's extremely easy to make a new stub template as it is, through the two existing standardised stub templates:


 * returns you This Foo article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by [ expanding it]. Category:Foo stubs


 * I'd argue that, since all you've got to do is copy, paste, and replace the word Foo twice, this is just as simple as any other method you could come up with. If you want a picture, you can use the metapicstub template in the same way:

(
 * Ideally all stubs should use either of these two methods, which would serve the purposes you are proposing,a s they link to metatemplates. I realise there are problems mentioned with metatemplates, but they mainly (IIRC) involve problems when the metatemplates themselves are edited - the ones we have work fine and are unlikely ever to need editing (famous last words...?).


 * A major disadvantage I see with your system is one of the things you see in its favour - the ease with which you can create new stub categories. Now, it takes a deliberate effort to make a new stub category. If that effort were to disappear we might well suddenly find 200 new stub categories appearing overnight because someone thinks it's cool to have a Britney Spears stub or an Ali G stub or a New England Patriots stub. We'd be swimming in stubs. Grutness|hello? [[Image:Grutness.jpg|25px|]] 09:23, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't think that's too radical a suggestion to consider ... (rephrasing) eliminate the categorization of stubs and treat 'stub' as an article-type, categorizing that stub-article using the present article-categorization mechanism. I currently stub an article to a single category of stub then, if it makes sense, categorize the stub-article as I would an article to an existing category.  Example: B.T. (tabloid), stubbed to Newspaper and categorized to Denmark.  Am I doing evil by this through "contamination" of article categories with stubs (i.e. embryonic articles)? Courtland 03:04, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)


 * Is there really a reason to lose pictures? Is there a reason (perhaps technical) why Categories could not be opened up to the acceptance of pictures as stub-categories currently are?  I think that it would be as if not more useful to have a line of icons in the Category bar in addition to textual links.  I'm guessing at an answer to my own question, though, that the reason why they work for the stub categories is that they appear as part of the stub-template action and, in the absence of a calling template (as there would not be one for a standard category), there would not be a mechanism currently to support association of a Category with a Categorical Icon.  Is this right?  Courtland 03:08, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)

Need some help with a new stub category
Template:Texas_stub. Created it last night, have added it to a few articles. Having trouble with gettign it into the list of stub category pages.

Great stuff
I think this Wikiproject will have enormous benefits. I'm sorry I don't expect to get involved directly at this stage, but I wanted to say that I've found the excellent (not perfect, nothing on a Wiki is perfect and if it was (-> it wouldn't stay that way for long) documentation and intelligent discussion tremendously helpful and encouraging. What I will try to do is to categorise stubs I find or create according to your decisions, and also try to find some more time to work on expanding stubs now that you're making it so much easier to find the ones I can help with. Keep it up! Andrewa 13:34, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Stubs for articles in natural series
I recently saw that the article 1734 in science had been stubbed generically and decided after some consideration to un-stub it. It's been re-stubbed generically and there's a bit in my personal discussion space about this, which I quote here:


 * I debated whether or not to rescind the stub designation and was curious about whether this was just a random stand-along (sic) "year in science". It turns out that there's one article for most such years (I didn't do a survey but just poked around a bit) and I thought that designating a "time bin" in such a series wasn't what I'd consider doing.  I'm glad you brought this up, as it prompts me to put the question to the WikiProject_Stub_sorting discussion forum.

So the question is, do you agree with this reasoning or am I getting "stub-phobic"? I've not seen discussion of this matter elsewhere yet. Thanks. Courtland 05:31, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)

I think there's room for expansion, enough so to leave it as a stub, but I think it should be a science-stub. 1733 seems more complete. RJFJR 06:28, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)


 * I must have been asleep when I wrote that. Sorry. What we do not need is this cluttering up the stubs categories.  What we need is a project to fill this in.  How about an article or talk page asking people to populate the dateline; and then we can mark the request as a stub to attract attention?  That way people will see the note about populating it in stubs but it won't clutter up the stub category.  Maybe it should be  List of years in science that are stubs  (or something better worded)? RJFJR 14:00, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)


 * That sounds like a fine idea. There are no doubt other year-series that would benefit from similar treatment; maybe an umbrella project like "Wikipedia Years" and each year-series having their own project under that umbrella? Courtland 17:24, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)


 * There are many variants of these 1720 in Canada is another. I suggest Timeline stubs --Circeus 22:04, Feb 15, 2005 (UTC)


 * "Timeline stubs" ... it has a nice ring to it. Courtland 00:09, 2005 Feb 16 (UTC)


 * Agreed, YixilTesiphon likes. --YixilTesiphon 00:13, Feb 16, 2005 (UTC)

Deletion of useless stubs and stub categories policy
I have placed Deletion of useless stub templates and stub categories under voting here: Deletion of useless stub templates and stub categories/Vote. Please make your comments and voting there. -- AllyUnion (talk) 09:26, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Another listing on cfd
There is currently a proposal on cfd to merge Airport-stub and Aircraft-stub (see Categories_for_deletion).

Should there be a special section on the Stub Sorting project page to keep track of current stubs listed on tfd, cfd, and the new dus&sc page? Grutness|hello? 23:58, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Definitely --Circeus 00:13, Feb 14, 2005 (UTC)

Someone has also tagged Category:Medicine stubs for deletion (see Categories_for_deletion) Courtland 01:57, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)

Someone has also tagged Category:Rail stubs for deletion (see Categories_for_deletion) Courtland 02:02, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)

...and Category:Wireless stubs as well Courtland 02:05, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)

Are we making any progress
I've been sorting stubs like mad but there were so many at the beginning I can't tell if we're making any progress. If people are creating stubs faster than we're sorting then we're actually going backward. Does anyone have counts of total stubs now and a while back to see if we're getting anywhere? RJFJR 01:05, Feb 14, 2005 (UTC)
 * There were about 4680 articles in Category:stub last week (it was onto the 24th page of them, anyway). Looking at the history of some of the new ones it looks as though there are a lot of "hidden stubs" out there, which for some reason don't get listed in Category:stub until someone edits them firther (I've noticed that with a lot of the Montreal Metro station stubs that have come through lately. Not sure why, but it could be there aren't actually a huge number more, just that more are getting through to the category when they didn't before. Grutness|hello? [[Image:Grutness.jpg|25px|]] 01:21, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * The stub category was re-added to the stub template (by User:Bacchiad on 25 Jan 2004 as his only edit to the template, and without any discussion on the talk page and maybe not even looking at the talk page). I found over 4,000 articles in the stub category (which is where the WikiMedia software quits listing them for me at Susan Weber Soros). My guess is that there are probably around 5,000 articles in the stub category. User:Jamesday, one of the software developers, has said that the target for the size of categories should be under 500, but definately under 1,000. See his comments as part of Meta-templates considered harmful where he also endorses the subdividing of the stub category into topic stubs. Blank Verse   &empty;   09:15, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Speaking of "hidden stubs", I found a clump the I stubbed into Category:University stubs when I stumbled across a network of community colleges, each of which had a short un-stubbed article associated with it. Courtland 01:46, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)


 * Because of template caching issues, articles with the stub tag do not show up in the category unless they have been edited since the category was added to the template. A more useful method for counting the number of stubs is to do a search on Google for "This article is a stub." I got "about 20,500". (Of course, that's not entirely reliable, either, and certainly not up to date.) -Aranel (" Sarah ") 01:55, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * twenty thousand???. Yikes. Better start sorting then... Grutness|hello? [[Image:Grutness.jpg|25px|]]

Actually, it might be worth looking into doing a database dump and perform a search based analysis. -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:16, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

This is an interesting way to find stubs. I did this search and found for example Metatarsus, which was not in the main list as I have looked very hard for med and anatomy stubs. Onco p53 09:04, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * What we've got seems to be this: About 4500 stubs listed in Category:Stub, plus an unknown large number (possibly 15-16,000) of stubs that aren't listed there. These are trickling into the category whenever the articles are edited, as are any new stubs. Surely for now the 4500 are enough to worry about. The unlisted ones are arriving in the category at about the same rate as we are removing those there, but the flow of old stubs should eventually slow down due to attrition and the category will start to thin. When that happens I'll start to think about where to find unlisted stubs. For now we've got plenty of work to do bailing the category out (not a bad analogy - it often feels like we're trying to keep a leaky boat above water!) Grutness|hello? [[Image:Grutness.jpg|25px|]] 13:06, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Thats fine, but after I have gone through Category:Stub for all science related topics, I need more to do. I'd prefer to stick with changing the stubs on articles that I actually know something about, also I get to read about topics that are interesting to me, and I do a bit of editing as well as the stubbing. Onco p53 03:26, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps people can state what categories / areas of interest they currently focus on. I'm not familiar with every single existing stub category, and even though I periodically go through long lists and look at every article, I don't stub most of them because I'm not sure if they belong under history, biography, history of (country), (occupation), etc. I've seen people revert "stubbings" because they didn't fit the correct criteria, which really defeats the purpose. I can understand people don't want just any kind of stuff being dumped in an (according to them) unrelated category, but no one should expect everyone to be familiar with everything. I'm never going to remember what the difference is between linguistics and language. For the record, if anyone finds an article that is science related and you're not sure if it can better fit in a sub category, just dump it in science and I'll eventually sort it properly. If people don't mind going through general categories that might contain some/many "misses", then please say so, it could really help speed things along. --jag123 19:07, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * I've thought of another way to look at how much progress we have made. If you check Category:Stub, you will see that we have gotten as far as the beginning of the "I" entries on the first page (most of the time, anyway). When I started to sort stubs, the first page was pretty much filled with with "A" and "B" articles. That looks like progress to me. -Aranel (" Sarah ") 01:43, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)