Wikipedia talk:Stub/Archive 13

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MoS naming style

There is currently an ongoing discussion about the future of this and others MoS naming style. Please consider the issues raised in the discussion and vote if you wish GnevinAWB (talk) 21:01, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Are articles with little free text but long tables stubs or not?

I started cleaning the Wikipedia:Database reports/Long stubs and a bunch of the articles there are litte free text but lots of big tables articles, such as 2004–05 Florida Gators men's basketball team. I am not sure whether they are stubs (due to little free text) or not (due to their long and extensive tables). Thoughts? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 20:53, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

I would say not. They have significant amount of useful content. Rich Farmbrough, 02:31, 5 May 2010 (UTC).

Move

Wikipedia:Stub → Wikipedia:Manual of Style (stub) — Consolidating naming per Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#Poll Gnevin (talk) 16:22, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Oppose; per my comment at the relevant discussion at MOS talk, this page has no useful style guidance and should be branded as an editing guideline. Christopher Parham (talk) 18:54, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Fine with me , remove from the MOS so Gnevin (talk) 19:55, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Oppose. Not a style issue. -- œ^™ 09:43, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Oppose: Per Chris, should simply be rebranded an editing guideline.—DCGeist (talk) 19:44, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Valueless links in stub templates

A high proportion of stub templates have embedded wikilinks which are either ordinary dictionary words (e.g history in {{Asia-hist-stub}}), or very low value in themselves (e.g. Africa in {{Africa-bio-stub}}), or is a technical term that's almost certainly already linked in the article itself (e.g. {{Lycaenidae-stub}}). It seems to me that the vast majority of links in stub templates add no value, so I plan to set about unlinking them. Any comments? Colonies Chris (talk) 09:22, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Only just came across this comment by chance - this is the sort of thing which should be discussed at WT:WSS. Grutness...wha? 04:08, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Do not remove the wikilinks from mature (non-stub) templates, and I think you should stop the massive link removal you are performing, often you are breaking the layout, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Currencies_of_Asia&oldid=398418745 200.77.0.177 (talk) 15:53, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

In this one case I inadvertently broke the layout, for which I apologise; why do you say 'often'? Do you have any other examples? No-one else has complained of any errors. Colonies Chris (talk) 22:27, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Edit request from Rwilkin, 4 January 2011

{{edit semi-protected}} Under the heading "Basic information", the first sentence uses unnecessarily awkward English. For example, the double negative in the phrase "but not so short as to provide no useful information" would be more straight-forward if written as "but sufficient to include useful information." Rwilkin (talk) 03:05, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

I've amended the wording, though not exactly as you suggested - see if it seems any better now. Grutness...wha? 10:06, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

Soul searching on stubs: What is the purpose of a stub after all?

After many years of thought on the subject of stubs, there are some questions I have, and I am wondering what opinions others have about stubs: Sebwite (talk) 23:42, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

1.) What is the purpose of the "stub" label? Is it really necessary?

I am wondering what others think. Is it really necessary to label an article as a stub just because it is short? And what good does such a label do? Is it here to tell others it needs to be expanded? Is it here to say "don't delete me because I'm short?" Any other ideas? It is important to remember that Wikipedia is not finished and few if any articles are really ever complete, meaning that there is always room for expansion to an article, whether it be one line or a dozen headings each with several paragraphs. (Sebwite's original comment)

• Yes, it is necessary. Marking a short article as a stub performs several key functions. The principle two are that it categorises the article in such a way as to make it easier for editors to find articles they may wish to work on and it adds a prompting note to readers that they may have more information which could improve the article. Grutness...wha? 01:23, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

2.) What constitutes a stub?

The {{stub}} tag has been placed on a huge number of articles. Some have one or two sentences and that's all. Others are several paragraphs or even longer, and they still have a stub tag. Some articles have stub tags when their writers think there is potential for more expansion, even though all the information from all the existing sources has been included in them, and they are still relatively short.

Should there be an official standard defining what length is a stub, and after how much information there should not be a stub tag? If so, should it be a sentence? A paragraph? A screen-sized page? (Sebwite's original comment)

• No, there can never be one standard official definition of the length, since different articles have different levels of information which can be added to them. Is one short paragraph containing all that is known about an acient Celtic ruler a stub? No. Is one short paragraph about the history of the united States a stub? Most definitely. And don't forget that most rules governing what is or isn't a stub involve only the text of an article, and not lists and navigation templates. this makes any automated way of choosing an arbitrary length unworkable.These factors are the main reason for my widely-used essay on stub lengths, User:Grutness/Croughton-London rule of stubs. Grutness...wha? 01:23, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

• • I have always disagreed with that essay, I have to say, but not with the content, simply with using it to define "stub" rather than "articles to be expanded". A stub is by analogy with a coding stub, a sub routine that simply acts as a syntactic placeholder, returning, perhaps, one of its arguments unchanged, or a fixed piece of text. Similarly stubs to my mind are articles that contain the bare minimum to exist "Charles Darwin was a famous naturalist." perhaps. Keeping them labelled as stubs up to short paragraph length, maybe a little more is quite reasonable, but the widespread dilution of the concept of "stub" led to the idea of "sub-stubs" for a number of years (a term now thankfully rarely heard). The idea that something is a stub merely because we find it "embarrassingly short", does not hold water, since many of our articles would be "embarrassingly short" if they were the full coverage of their eponymous subject, they are not, there are for example thousands of pages in the category London. Rich Farmbrough, 22:21, 4 February 2011 (UTC).
    
    • Strange choice of analogy. I'd have thought it would be analogous to the idea of a stub in journalism, which is almost exactly what is written in that essay. I wasn't aware there was such a concept as a stub in coding. Grutness...wha? 00:37, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

• • • • I thought I had seen some early definitions of stubs, but it appears they are lost in the mists of time (before history was kept). An early list however, survives, which points one to such stub as Anton Chekov, for those interested in such things. I too have learned from this thread. Rich Farmbrough, 04:00, 7 February 2011 (UTC).
        

3.) Should permastubs exist as standalone articles?

Wikipedia is full of numerous stubs that are indeed a sentence or two long. Some, in addition to that sentence, include an infobox and possibly a navbox, together with a lot of whitespace to the left of the infobox. Their existence is not challenged, and would probably win a challenge, because these subjects tyically belong in categories everyone accepts as inherently notable (e.g. populated places, politicians, professional athletes). Is it appropriate to leave these indefinitely as standalone pages marked as stubs? Or should they be merged into a single page listing all that basic information in a chart? (Sebwite's original comment)

• The answer to that one varies from subject to subject. In many cases, such as minor characters in a novel or episodes of a television series, a list is a good way to go, and any which grow to the point where they can become stand-alone articles more than a couple of sentences in length can then be linked from that article. In other cases, however, making one mass article is not appropriate, as it can blur the distinctions between quite separate things. The items you mentioned are in this latter category: articles on populated places within a country are rarely if ever amalgamated into a larger "group" article, for instance, and neither are articles on politicians or athletes. It is far better that they stand alone, as the relationship between those items is far more tenuous and less easily written as a single article than the relationship, say, between the characters in a book. I note that you call these "permastubs", yet this is not the case. Although they may appear not to change from one viewing to the next, there is no reason why they cannot be expanded (and indeed, many are) - there is a slow but steady turnover of a considerable proportion of the stubs on WP. Grutness...wha? 01:21, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

multiple stub tags on a single article

This guideline currently says:

If an article overlaps several stub categories, more than one template may be used, but it is strongly recommended that only those relating to the subject's main notability be used. A limit of three or, if really necessary, four stub templates is advised.

4 stub templates on a single article? really? Yoenit (talk) 10:36, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

It does categorize the article for various wikiprojects. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:22, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Adding articles to categories does not require a visible template. You could simply hide all stub templates besides the most general one and still retain that function. Yoenit (talk) 14:36, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Hide? How would that help? I'm not saying it doesn't, just asking "How?" Rich Farmbrough, 19:56, 5 February 2011 (UTC).

The problem with multiple stub tags to me is that it looks ridiculous, especially if the article is just a one line stub. If you hide all but one you can apply all relevant stub tags without the article looking like a stubtemplate linkfarm. Yoenit (talk) 17:45, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, I don;t care how a stub looks, within reason. Personally I find the icons un-necessary (not all stub templates have them) - if someone's looking at the stub, they presumably know that it's about Welsh football, if they don't they probably shouldn't be editing it. On the other hand it does draw the eye towards the stub categories. But again a stub is a stub - if you don't like how it looks, make it into an article. Rich Farmbrough, 03:42, 7 February 2011 (UTC).

It's not often Rich and I agree on stub issues :) but that sums things up pretty well. Grutness...wha? 21:52, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Yoenit, you do realise that we've been through that exact same argument several times over the last few years (all of which should be in the archives)? And anyway, what is 'The most general one" for an article such as Four Corners? A Utah-geo-stub por an Arizona-geo-stub? Or would we need to add yet a further template for the US midwest overall? Grutness...wha? 00:26, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

We have Category:Midwestern United States geography stubs, but no template as far as I can see. So I would just use the slightly more general {{US-geo-stub}}. Yoenit (talk) 17:45, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Which would mean either using a less-precise stub type (making it less effective for editors) or adding a fifth template (making it even worse from the point of view of what you're trying to achieve). Grutness...wha? 20:53, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Third option: hide the four state specific stubs and have only the general one visible. Yoenit (talk) 22:22, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

That's effectively identical to the second option - there'd still be five templates - with the added disadvantage that the article would be in both state-specific stub categories and in a superfluous more general one. Grutness...wha? 22:02, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

I did look through the archives, but couldn't find prior discussion of this: Have we considered modifying the stub templates into a format e.g. {{stub|type|type}}, where each of the multiple type parameters would allow a different argument (e.g. {{stub|Arizona|Utah}})? fr:Modèle:Ébauche (the equivalent of template:stub) does this on fr.wikipedia - see it in action on e.g. fr:Mohammed IV de Grenade, where the stub template (at the top of the page) identifies it (and categorizes it; see the hidden categories at the bottom of the page) as a stub about Andalusia, history, and a person.

This could replace multiple template sentences with a single sentence like "This article, about Arizona, Utah, etc etc, is a stub." That would consolidate everything to a single line and avoid dominating what are necessarily short articles with line after line of template text.

Obviously it would be a big change to the coding of stub templates, though since they're transcluded perhaps it would be less difficult to roll this out than it would be with subst'd templates. (I say this from a position of relative ignorance about how template coding actually works, I'll admit.) Gonzonoir (talk) 10:32, 10 February 2011 (UTC)