Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Archive 16

This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 10

←

Archive 14

Logs?

I was looking at the /Discoveries page and the logs haven't been updated in a while. February and March requests are still going under January. --Jeremy (blah blah • I did it!) 19:26, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Just needed a willing volunteer to place everything ... Dawynn (talk) 19:06, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Proposed talk page template

I've created a talk page template to be used when an editor uses the {{stub}} tag instead of sorting it further. Feel free to make any edits at {{Stub sort}}.

Hello WikiProject Stub sorting. Thank you for tagging Wikipedia:Sandbox as a stub. I noticed that you used the {{stub}} template. In the future, it would be greatly appreciated if you could sort the article to a subcategory by using one of these templates instead, which is easy to do using the StubSorter tool. For example, you can use {{US-novelist-1960s-stub}} for an American novelist born in the 1960s. Of course, if you can't find a proper category, you can always use the {{stub}} tag and someone else will sort it for you, or you can propose a new stub template or category here. Thanks!

Using subst: is recommended, I didn't so changes can be shown on this page. See also my talk page for another example. I'm still working out a few bugs, feel free to help if you can. Gosox⁽⁵⁵⁾₍₅₅₎ 20:48, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

I made a few tweaks. Looks good to me. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:54, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Israeli settlement stubs

How should we stub Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories, Sinai, Golan Heights etc? It seems extremely POV to label them "Geography of Israel", as they are widely recognized as illegal. However, stubbing them as "Geography of the Palestinian territories" isn't exactly correct either. They are controlled by Israel and are mostly likely going to be expanded by those looking for Israeli stubs. Thoughts?--TM 22:15, 12 March 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject for {{Christian-radio-station-stub}}

What WikiProject should the above Stub come under, WikiProject Radio Stations or WikiProject Christianity? Kathleen.wright5 22:42, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps WikiProject Christian music? That's what Category:Christian radio stations is under. —Paul A (talk) 01:17, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Template Placement and Whitespace

Currently your documentation says to place stub templates last after the Categories, This produces needless whitespace between the last template on the page and the stub template (Example: {After Categories} and {Before Categories}). Perhaps your documentation could be updated to recommend placing them as the last template but before the categories to reduce whitespace issues? Peachey88 ^{(Talk Page · Contribs)} 03:38, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

The placement is in accordance with the Manual of Style which says they follow categories and spaced by 2 lines. Keith D (talk) 22:12, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

China and PRChina, and Taiwan and RoChina stub types

Should a clear policy be drawn, and all existing stub types be carefully reviewed? The current situation is rather messy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.237.150.205 (talk) 11:12, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

We have come to a situation in which hospitals in mainland China that were closed before the People's Republic was established are tagged as {{PRChina-hospital-stub}}. The same tag is applied to hospitals in colonial Hong Kong that were closed before the UK handed over the territory to the People's Republic. Meanwhile {{China-university-stub}} (a subcat of Cat:Universities in the People's Republic of China) is applied to universities in mainland China that were closed before or very shortly after the demise of the RoChina on the mainland.

Hong Kong stub types

Should Hong Kong stub templates that are not yet having any stub category be fed into the Asia one or the China one? Some Hong Kong stubs are actually not related to China nor the People's Republic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.237.150.205 (talk) 11:15, 19 April 2010 (UTC)

Wanted: One stub sorter willing to do a small amount of daily work

Hi all - regretfully, health issues mean that I will be greatly reducing my workload on Wikipedia in general and WP:WSS in particular (full details can be found on my user page). Most of the tasks I do here aren't that important - though I do regularly sweep out any unsubcategorised stubs from various geo-stub categories, as listed at the top of my sandbox.

One task that I do daily, though, is very important: I check any new templates that are made, looking for unproposed ones that need to be taken to either WP:WSS/D or WP:SFD. please could I ask that someone else takes up this task? It usually takes very little time, but can be a bit stressful occasionally, since it's here that WP:WSS tends to come into contact with people who either don't know or don't care about the proposal process.

Given how many new pages are kept listed under Special:NewPages, this task would need to be done at least every two or three days, though I prefer to do it daily if possible ((it takes less time per go that way, and it's easier to knwo which ones have or haven't been checked). Grutness...wha? 22:15, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear that! I wish you all the best, whatever your circumstances may be. Everyone else: Please don't be intimidated by the occasional situations Grutness mentions; while I'm not a stub sorter myself, I think I know what he means, and I'd be happy to help as a mediator in any such cases. In any such event, please leave me a notice on my talk page, as I don't usually have this page on my watchlist. — Sebastian 02:47, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear that as well. I will attempt to take over this job, as I've been meaning to get more involved in this WikiProject for quite some time. Gosox⁽⁵⁵⁾₍₅₅₎ 21:31, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Stubs and lists (and lists of lists)

There are a batch of "lists of lists" currently labelled as {{stub}} by Yobot. They're being stubbed automatically because of an AWB rule specifying that the tag can be added to anything under 300 characters. I'm inclined to add a long comment and remove the stub tag, but not sure that this is right. Should the AWB rule exclude lists? or "lists of lists"? I've raised it at User_talk:Magioladitis#Yobot_and_stubs_and_lists_of_lists. PamD (talk) 11:10, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Examples (as they may be out of the stub category by the time you look there) include Lists of Valencia metro stations, Lists of Scottish counties by population and Lists of Australian rules football leagues. PamD (talk) 11:14, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

The examples you gave each list only two list. I would call them WP:DAB pages. I see little or no value, and they've each been around a few years. I've endorsed your WP:PROD of one. Maurreen (talk) 11:33, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

Listing hierarchy in the template's doc

How do you fix the hierarchy in the template's documentation? I'm looking at about five stub templates, e.g., Template:Cutaneous-infection-stub, which should probably be considered 'children' of Template:Dermatology-stub and/or Template:Cutaneous-condition-stub.

The cats are already arranged correctly, but the template documentation doesn't name the intermediate steps (which I think might be useful to the occasional editor, if the more specific template doesn't seem to quite fit).

The stub templates don't seem to use a normal doc page, and I haven't been able to find the instructions anywhere. Can someone point me in the right direction? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:03, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

There is a relevant discussion at Template talk:Asbox#Populating stubtree with a tree? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:54, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

How to speed up move to new category?

I've been baffled how, just recently, it seems that new stub categories are not filling accurately.

Here's the issue. In accordance with stub policies, I'll create an upmerge template linking to one particular parent category. Then, once I find 60 articles, I try to move everything into a new child category. The category and template link up correctly, and any newly tagged articles are placed in the new category, but the original 60 stay in the old category, unless they get resaved.

Here's a couple examples of categories that have been waiting days to receive their articles:

4/22/10 - {{Atari-console-stub}} linked to Category:Atari console game stubs. 5 day wait.
4/24/10 - {{beatemup-videogame-stub}} linked to Category:Beat 'em up stubs. 3 day wait.

It seems like it was only a month or so ago when, if I updated the template at certain times of the day, the articles would dump right into the new category. Why the long wait now? Dawynn (talk) 11:34, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm not exactly sure, but it's related to the job queue and I've also noticed that it's taking a long time for articles to move these days. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:52, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Explicit stub categories.

I just found an article with a stub cat from 2008. Fixed it up and went looking. There are nearly 5k articles (as of March) with stub cats. What to do? Rich Farmbrough, 02:53, 5 May 2010 (UTC).

Category:Piracy stubs

These are a sub-cat of "people by occupation stubs" Category:Pirate stubs if it existed would be the rightful sub-cat of people by occupation. Rich Farmbrough, 10:13, 5 May 2010 (UTC).

Italian sport stubs

I recently created Category:Italian sport stubs and {{Italy-sport-stub}}. It's likely that I omitted some step that you folks would have liked me to take, or I did it in some way that was slightly different that what you would prefer. I am notifying you here so that you can clean it up after me. Also because I used {{WPSS-cat}} to say that you would be maintaining it. Thanks. —Mark Dominus (talk) 19:24, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

What is your process for renaming?

I am a member of the Canadian music project. Is it possible to get our seven stubs renamed from "Canada" to "Canadian"?

I ask because every category to which these stubs relate are all named Category:Canadian ??? Thanks. Argolin (talk) 08:47, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

There are a lot of mismatches between main categories and stub-types, and it's probably more important to keep the whole huge family of stubtypes consistent with each other: people who sort stubs cover the whole gamut of subject matter, so knowing that it's "[country]-singer-stub" just like it's "[country]-footy-bio-stub" or "[country]-geo-stub" is much easier to remember. If some countries used the adjective and some the noun, it would be much slower to sort stubs. PamD (talk) 22:14, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

There are 13 cats under Category:Canada stubs with the Canadian prefix and 8 with the Canada? Also, not all the stub types listed above are on your document page. I'll find the exact page if you need me to. I was looking for all the stubs for our project last week when I posted the request for a Category:Canadian music stubs. From what you saying, the new cat will be named Category:Canada music stubs. Can I create it? I can see your group is very busy. Argolin (talk) 06:06, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

New Zealand government / politics stubs

In New Zealand, we have a politics taskforce. The related page is Wikipedia:WikiProject New Zealand/politics. In April 2010, the project was renamed from Wikipedia:WikiProject New Zealand/governments to broaden its scope, and to more accurately reflect the scope. I suspect that Category:New Zealand government stubs exists because it reflected the former taskforce name. I propose that the category be deleted, and the 62 pages be added to Category:New Zealand politics stubs (where there are currently 449 pages and 2 subcategories). I've posted a note at Category talk:New Zealand government stubs as well as politics task force talk page. Schwede 66 18:30, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

The page you want for proposing that is WP:SFD. Grutness...wha? 22:18, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, Mr Grutness, for (once again) putting me on the right path. You have your eyes everywhere! I've put my thoughts on Category talk:New Zealand government stubs. Schwede 66 03:32, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Category:Onchidiidae stubs

I noticed that the category Onchidiidae stubs is in the category Heterobranchia stubs along with Pulmonata stubs, however Onchidiidae is a superfamily under the informal class Pulmonata. My question is should I move Onchidiidae stubs into the Pulmonata stubs category? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pepper543210 (talk • contribs) 23:06, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

What is the process for deleting a stub template?

I don't believe the template {{Canada-country-band-stub}} was authorised by your project. The Canadian music project currently has a total 80 country musical groups (including subgenres). Placement of this template adds the article to Category:Canadian musical group stubs. Further, there is no mention of this template in the Category:Canadian country music groups. I don't see it's usefulness at this point for the Canadian music project as it is the only genre based stub type. Can it be deleted? Argolin (talk) 23:21, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

All the details about stub type deletion are at the top of WP:Stub types for deletion, which is the process page you should use to propose this. Grutness...wha? 22:55, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Grutness. As I thought an unauthorised stub per WP:STUBS. I'll post it later in June to the WP:WSS/D after I familiarise myself with the process. Argolin (talk) 01:15, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Can I create stub templates that were approved way back?

At Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals/2009/June#Reorganisation of Pharmacology stub categories, splitting the Category:Pharmacology stubs (> 3000 entries) and the corresponding stub template was discussed and approved of, though never implemented. Can I go ahead with it, or is there something like an expiry date for this consensus? Thanks --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 15:51, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Go right ahead.--TM 16:13, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Thank you --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 16:55, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

How do I (for example) mark {{antiinfective-agent-stub}} as a subtype of {{pharma-stub}}, so that the "Stub hierarchy" box in the template documentation shows the correct relationship? --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 19:43, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

The stub heirarchy is just an automated tool to find subwords of the name which are also templates. For example if Template:Agent-stub existed, then this would be displayed. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:20, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Okay, thanks --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 08:34, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

How stub templates interfere with a certain script

Thread retitled from "How stub templates obstruct article development - beware JPGs".

OK, that's perhaps an overdramatic way of describing a rather obscure complaint. However, many stub templates prevent articles appearing on User:Mr.Z-man's excellent tool for finding articles that lack images. The reason for this is that the tool looks up a database that records any usage of images in the article, not just Image: and File: but within templates and message boxes. This meant that pretty much any stub did not appear on lists generated by the tool, because it saw the picture in the stub template and assumed it depicted the subject of the article.
After I pointed this out, Z-man said that rewriting the code to use a different database wasn't really an option, but he has just changed the tool so that there's now an option to only look for JPEGs in articles. It's not perfect, but it works well enough as long as none of the stub templates contains a JPEG. I've been taking photos of central London lately, and found that just swapping JPGs for SVGs in the stub templates for London roads, structs and railway stations allowed >90% of articles without images to show up in Z-man's lists. However there is a long tail of other stub templates that can be placed on geotaggable articles, particularly in Category:Building and structure stubs and more generally in Category:Geography stubs.
Personally I find that JPG photos are usually unintelligible at the 30px size typical of stub templates, and I also think SVG cartoony images are better on style grounds for meta stuff like stub templates to contrast with the JPGs in the article content. The clincher has to be that it doesn't make much difference for stub purposes what the image is, but it makes a critical difference to a tool that helps make Wikipedia better. I'm not necessarily saying that someone should go out and change all the JPGs to SVGs immediately (although it would be nice, particularly on the members of Category:Church stubs relevant to London <g> ) but it should be something to bear in mind when creating new stub templates.Le Deluge (talk) 11:38, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Erm, i think that is a bad idea, he [the bot/script] should just go though a list then us use a list of stub templates to work out which pages need to be ruled in/out of the list. Peachey88 ^{(Talk Page · Contribs)} 09:45, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't really see the point — presumably most stubs lack images, and in most cases that's bottom of the priority list for fixing. (Note that lots and lots of excellent, complete articles neither have nor need images, if they're on academic subjects that happen to be difficult to visualize.) --Trovatore (talk) 10:02, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

I find these responses rather depressing, it's almost as though Peachey88 and Trovatore don't want stubs to be improved. We're talking about the subset of articles that are geotagged, which means that almost always they have a physical manifestation - we're not talking Dialectics here, but churches and statues and office blocks. I don't think you can really say much about priorities, an image really can be worth 1000 words, and an image would be regarded as a prerequisite for getting a WP:GA for this kind of article. And, critically, someone who knows about the subject may not be able to get a free-licence photo, and vice versa. You can imagine an Australian cricket historian writing about the history of the home of cricket, or a Canadian music fan writing about the club where Paul McCartney met Linda and where Hendrix played a famous gig, but finding it hard to find photos of the sites short of spending $100's on flying to London. Whereas I already have a notable site in Kingly St on my list of "photos to take", and if I'm aware of others needed in the vicinity it's a trivial effort to take the photo, even if I have no particular knowledge of the old-time London club scene that would allow me to contribute to the words in the article.

As I said, Z-man has already indicated that fixing it at the script end would entail a major rewrite that he's not prepared to do. And as I also said, the bot is only one reason to move away from JPGs in stub templates - they're generally so small as to be illegible, and I think "cartoony" SVGs are more appropriate for meta templates in any case. Le Deluge (talk) 12:55, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

"that he's not prepared to do" and others are apparently not prepared to do what you are proposing. I think it's a bit of wasted effort as well. Why not just use another list of stub articles and wade trough those as well ? I'm assuming most won't have a relevant image either. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:16, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

I agree with DJ here. Making some peculiar changes to images because a tool doesn't do something properly isn't a good way to go about this. One could scan a the stubs looking for Image: / File: in the wikitext. Section retitled. –xeno^talk 14:20, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Stub categories are project categories

You lot may be interested in an essay that I wrote: User:Alan Liefting/Essays/Stub categories are project categories. Cheers. -- Alan Liefting (talk) - 09:51, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Question about - Template:Christian-radio-station-stub

Would it be OK to put the above Stub under Radio stations and Christianity, or if not which one should it go under? --kathleen wright5 (talk) 06:21, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Albums stubs

I've proposed some new album stub templates that will reach 60. I just need someone to make them. It's far past the required amount of time, but I've proposed new templates for these things multiple times in the past and they never happened because nobody stepped in. I'm not making an account just for this, but I will do all the work. I just would appreciate it if those templates were made. Thanks. 174.98.251.19 (talk) 03:26, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Stub_types/Culture#Albums --AllyUnion (talk) 23:00, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

stubs and "Uncategorised"

If an article has a sorted stub tag but no other categories, should it also have {{Uncategorised}}? I argue that it shouldn't, as the stub tag puts it into a stub category which has a parent non-stub category so that the article is now within a category. I don't know whether there's chapter and verse on it one way or the other? PamD (talk) 17:36, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

There is also {{Uncategorized stub}}. Jason Quinn (talk) 16:58, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Any ideas on beauty pageants?

I don't often feel defeated by a stub, but can't think how to stub-sort Miss World 2011! Any ideas? PamD (talk) 17:06, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

"Repairing" the stub types list.

Just a heads up. I took the entire list of stub types by size found here, ignoring the small categories (60 and under, no subcategories). I've matched this up to the list of stub types found here. Anything that was not found, I have sorted in my own sandbox, and I am working on adding to this list. I'm trying to list everything in logical places, as much as possible, without double-listing much. I would appreciate another set of eyes looking in from time to time to make certain this list is being built appropriately. (Note: This task is partially a personally-enforced penance for building a number of stub categories without listing them on the stub types page.) Dawynn (talk) 00:46, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Stub sorting on italian wikipedia

Hi, i'd like to add some new stub categories on italian wikipedia, but i didn't find the right way to do it. Someone can tell me if the procedure here indicated is valid for the others wiki too? Thanks a lot.Ciaurlec (talk) 22:27, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Deprecated stub templates

A few deprecated stub templates have just appeared again at WP:SFD, owing to confusion about the fact that deprecated non-stub templates are usually deleted. To remedy this, I've created {{Stubdeprecated}}, to replace {{Tdeprecated}} on deprecated stub templates, and an equivalent category (Category:Deprecated stub templates), plus made a note at WP:DOT about why deprecated stub templates are usually jkept. Please have a look at them and make any necessary improvements! :) Grutness...wha? 00:01, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Duplicate stubs: Falls County, Tx

I've found articles placed directly in Category:Falls County, Texas stubs; and articles which are in there because they transclude {{FallsCountyTX-geo-stub}}. I have also found a template {{FallsTX-geo-stub}} which I believe duplicates the purpose of {{FallsCountyTX-geo-stub}}. What is the procedure to follow? --Redrose64 (talk) 18:43, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

I've redirected one template into the other, so that's solved - as for the direct adding of the category, that should never ever be done, and I've nominated the category for deletion at WP:SFD, as it is considerably undersized. Categories should never be added by hand- they should be replaced by the appropriate template and (if it seems to be happening a lot from just one editor) leave a note on the editor's talk page asking them not to do that (point them to WP:STUB, which tells editors how to mark stubs). Directly adding categories makes for a nightmare if and when categories are reorganised, and also makes it far harder to judge sizes of categories which need splitting/templates which need their own categories. In this case, it seems to have been a new category created "out of process" by the editor involved, and is clearly not of normal WSS standard, so nominating the category for deletion makes more sense. Grutness...wha? 22:18, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Unfortunately I can't inform the relevant editor, since I don't know who it was: Category:Falls County, Texas stubs has been depopulated.

For some months now I've been working through Wikipedia:Database reports/Stubs included directly in stub categories, and for each, I remove the stub cat and either: (a) if the talk page suggests Start-class or better - do nothing else; (b) if the stub cat concerned has a stub template which is directly relevant, I add that; (c) if the stub cat concerned is of a general nature, but has a more specific sub-cat which is applicable, I take the relevant stub template for the sub-cat and add that.

If I find persistent adding of stub cats w/o use of template (most of the articles in Category:Coal mining regions in the United Kingdom were among these, which I've now fixed), is there a suitable template message which I can issue? I don't see anything directly relevant in Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:42, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Mmmm. No there isn't - perhaps I should make one up... Didn't know about that database report, it looks very useful -I'll add that to the project's "To Do" list as well. Grutness...wha? 22:46, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

There is one now - {{uw-directcat}}. Grutness...wha? 23:23, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Image size in stubs

Hi. I frequently come across stubs with largely varying image sizes from one another. Which is quite ugly. Why not have a fixed image size for all stubs, maybe 30x30px? Rehman⁽⁺⁾ 13:54, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

The default is 40x30, although each template can be set individually to allow for particularly long or wide images to be accommodated. Can you give examples of the varying sizes and I'll check them out? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:21, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Yup - most are 40x30 which is regarded as pretty much the standard (and as Martin said, is set as the default). For reasons of format shape 35x35 and 30x40 are not uncommon and some (e.g., {{Chile-geo-stub}} understandably need other sizes. I tend to use a rule of thumb for unusually-shaped icons of AxB where A+B=70. Any single dimension beyond 50px is definitely getting too large, though. Grutness...wha? 21:23, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

Hmm. Why is it a bad idea to put up a strict rule to gave a 30x30 squared image on all stubs templates? Because, pages with multiple stub templates looks somewhat ugly (example). Rehman⁽⁺⁾ 00:22, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Most geo-stubs use maps, most generic national stubs use flags. If you want to suggest that every country changes its flag and national boundaries, go ahead :) Grutness...wha? 07:35, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

I think fixing the height at 30px might work. The Chile example is obviously smaller but still visible. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:43, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

This Chile location article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

It might be visible, but it's far harder to tell what it's meant to be on a small screen. Grutness...wha? 22:36, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, my idea was actually to propose all stubs to look something like this; nice, small, and squared. ;) Rehman⁽⁺⁾ 13:33, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, and it won't work, for the reasons mentioned, unfortunately :) Grutness...wha? 22:36, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Yeah... ;) Rehman⁽⁺⁾ 01:30, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Improperly created stub template

I think that {{Welsh-Academics}} has been created improperly. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:27, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Stub_types_for_deletion#.7B.7BWelsh-Academics.7D.7D --Kslotte (talk) 15:46, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Multiple stub templates on the same page?

Most stub articles I come across have more than one stub template. The main message of a stub template is to convey "this is a short article, please expand". So, taking this article as a random example, further stubs like {{TyumenOblast-geo-stub}} and more may also qualify; all conveying the same "this is a short article, please expand".

Perhaps there should be a new rule on one stub per page? Instead of posting "this is a short building article, please expand", "this is a short structure article, please expand", "this is a short building in Japan article, please expand", it'll keep on going, all on the same page... Rehman 02:28, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Not sure how many times this has been discussed in the past but it's at least in double figures. The main purpose of a stub template is not to add a message - it is to categorise stubs into a place where editors will find it. The message, though important, is incidental. As such, it's often vital for stubs to have multiple templates on a page, since they're likely to be within the interest area of several groups of editors. This is why the standard rule is for up to a maximum of four stub templates per page to be appropriate (see WP:STUB for details). Grutness...wha? 04:05, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Oh. Then how about making it a bit nearer? Maybe it would be near-impossible, but wouldn't it be neater if a general template be implemented? Example:

{{Stub|1= |2= |3= |4= }}

Where filling in the relevant subject name (i.e. Power station) in field 1, would give the power station stub notice. And for multiple stubs, the remaining three fields. We could also embed auto categorization or any other feature into it, including the lead image.

And if necessary, each type of stub could be given a unique ID (like {{Wikipedia ads}}), which could be used for easy filling of the fields. Rehman 08:36, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

As I said, this has been discussed on many many occasions in the past, and that suggestion has been made on several occasions. Basically, it would make the whole stub scheme unmanageable and would make both stub sorting and stub tagging a nightmare, plus making it impossible to judge which stubs had been officially created and which hadn't, and how many stubs were connected to each stub type in upmerged categories. Autocategorisation would render the whole scheme of upmerging and threshold limits impossible as well. It would also mean there was one parametered template in use on some 750,000 articles, with the associated server risks if it needed to be altered, compared to the current scheme which deliberately limits the number of articles for each template. No offence, but please check the archives of this page before suggesting something like this, because we've gone over it many, many times. Grutness...wha? 08:41, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

I understand. Sorry for spamming here and not going through the archives ;) Thanks for taking the time to respond. Kind regards. Rehman 09:05, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

If you come across cases where the same pair of stub templates appear on a large number of different pages, you may raise a request (at WP:WSS/P) for a new stub type which overlaps both.

For example, there is {{Rail-station-stub}}, which is for railway stations anywhere, and there is {{UK-rail-stub}}, which is for railway topics in the UK; and there is also {{UK-railstation-stub}}, which covers the overlap: railway stations in the UK.

Similarly, there is {{Steam-loco-stub}}, which is for steam locomotives anywhere, and there is {{US-rail-stub}}, which is for railroad topics in the USA; but there isn't a stub category which covers both with a single template; so, in the absence of that, an article on a steam locomotive in the USA should be given both templates. At some point, if we found that there were a significant number of articles with both of these, we might consider that a new template {{US-steam-loco-stub}} was desirable. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:38, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

I think this is an excellent suggestion by Rehman and would make the wikicode much clearer and neater. I can't see that it would cause any problems at all. After looking through the archives I found a reference to such a template. I have added a few tweaks and it is now called Template:Multiple stub. It can be used in the following way: {{Multiple stub|Ghana|Sport-bio|Business}} produces the following

This Ghana-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

This biographical article relating to sports is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

This business-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

I've speedily deleted it. This has been tried before and overwhelmingly and resoundingly been opposed - and similar multi-stub types have been deleted in the past (hence the speedying). please read the archives of this page, and of related pages like WT:Stub before doing anything like that, for they contain all the reasons why they are an extremely bad idea and why they have been opposed so often (also, please read the details of proposing stub templates before creating them at WP:STUB!) I appreciate that it may appear to be a good idea in principle, but in practice it is disastrous. Grutness...wha? 23:58, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

I've restored it. This template has never, as far as I can tell, been discussed at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion. Therefore your deletion of it in this way is an abuse of administrator powers. If you continue to do so, I will begin a discussion at WP:ANI about your actions. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:59, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

You're right in that it's never been discussed with that name. And there's no logical reason why it would ever have been at TFD - it would have been at Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion, not Wikipedia:Templates for discussion. It's also possible, given that it was previously created (as above) as a demonstration, that it was previously on a user's subpage rather than being a fully-fledged template — in which case it would have been at WP:MFD. TFD's the last place to look. If I could remember the original name that was used for it, I would have provided the links. But it has definitely been deleted before under a different name. I've left it in place, though it should be speedily deleted for the reasons I have given, but since I cannot recall the name it went by previously I cannot provide proof of thaat without going through all the archives. I would very very strongly advise that it be deleted though. Grutness...wha? 18:15, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

It was never discussed because last time (when it was created by User:Jerzy) you also deleted it out of process and within 4 hours of creation. Grutness, even if these discussions did happen, they were back in 2006. You are going to have to explain your rationale and stop saying "it's been discussed before". Wikipedia has moved on an awful lot since 2006! — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:18, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Grutness, could you give us some links to previous discussions? A search on "multiple" on the archive produces umpteen links, not easy to see which ones lead to any substantial discussions. It might make for clearer discussion, rather than simply telling people "it's been discussed before". (Me, I'm perfectly happy with multiple separate stubs, but there are obviously some strong views to the contrary.) Thanks. PamD (talk) 11:46, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

See note above. Someone like Pegship or Waacstat may well remember, if they're still around here - it was during their time as "senior stub sorters" Grutness...wha? 18:15, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

I believe that a {{Multiple stub}} is a bad idea, as it makes the subsequent tasks related to stub soting more difficult. For example, if I want to re-categorize all stubs about prehistoric rodents in Category:Prehistoric rodent stubs using AutoWikiBrowser, I need to remove (if present) {{paleo-mammal-stub}} and {{rodent-stub}}. Should these be hidden away as {{Multiple stub|paleo-mammal|rodent}}, then the task is no longer AWB-able (note that the word "rodent" probably appears multiple times on each of the relevant stubs!). עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:57, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

And Grutness, unless you can refer us to a relevant XfD discussion, {{Multiple stub}} can't be deleted under CSD G4. I am considering bringing it to Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:58, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Categorization of stub templates by topic

There is an ongoing discussion here regarding categorization of stub templates by topic. Comments and suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thank you, -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 16:51, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Not sure how to fix Template:shia-stub

It appears that the formatting for {{shia-stub}} is busted somehow, as rather than categorising articles by Category:Shi'a Islam stubs it just straight categorises them as Shi'a Islam, so the stubs are cluttering up the parent category no matter how carefully they're sub-filed. Further, it's not linked in to the larger {islam-stub} network. I'm not totally sure how to correct this; suggestions? MatthewVanitas (talk) 13:08, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

This was due to this incorrect edit. I've fixed it so they are now categorised as Category:Islam stubs (there is no more refined stub category at the moment.) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:54, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, helps a lot in cleanup. I've left a message with the erring editor asking him to watch for that in the future. MatthewVanitas (talk) 15:19, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Missing stub types/typos

As part of an unrelated task, I've generated a list of attempts to transclude stub templates that do not exist. In all likelihood these represent a mix of typos and useful stub classes that have yet to be created. Alas, I haven;t the knowledge myself to sort through them. Are there any experts here who would care to have a go please ?

The list can be found at User:Topbanana/missing stubs

- TB (talk) 14:13, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Quite a few of them are simply typos, but most don't exist because, well, they don't exist - if only one or two articles need a template, then there's no point making one, so one or two coarser-grained templates are used. I'll start a bit of a sort of this list, but any more help would be appreciated! Grutness...wha? 22:06, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

If we fix some, as here, how would you like the fix to be noted so that others don't try to re-fix? --Redrose64 (talk) 22:14, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Usual way is ~~strike through~~. I started by just changing to list on TopBanana's page rather than fixing the articles (which was a bit silly, come to think of it), but I've started working on a few of the articles now, too. There are about 400 in all to do. Grutness...wha? 06:06, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Entirely up to you guys how you'd rather work. If the list is useful, move the page into this project and I'll watch it's talk page for request to regenerate the list or variations thereon. - TB (talk) 07:59, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

OK - thanks. Willdo. Grutness...wha? 10:02, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

New category header template

Hi all - I've just created a new stub category header template - {{Parent stub category}} - to replace the standard {{Stub category}} in those categories which are intended to be parent-only (i.e., "holding categories" for subtypes which all have their own templates). Use (and amend if necessary) at will! Grutness...wha? 23:45, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Inconsistent images

{{England-actor-stub}} and {{England-musician-stub}} have different size images - looks a mess at Ann Catley. Could someone who knows about these things fix whichever one is wrong? (But shouldn't music/actor icons be there as well or instead, anyway?) Thanks. PamD (talk) 12:05, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Government biogs

Category:Government biography stubs has no associated stub template. Ole Jacob Bull bears redlinked template {{Gov-bio-stub}}. This template appears to be linked from elsewhere, but doesn't seem to have been deleted: was it ever created? --Redrose64 (talk) 16:36, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Stub hierarchy

See {{UK-rail-stub}}, where beneath the heading "About this template", there is a stub hierarchy box with three rows. The box is generated by {{Asbox/stubtree}}, and most stub templates show just two rows here, the template itself and Stub. How is the {{Asbox/stubtree}} in {{UK-rail-stub}} configured to show the extra row? It might be useful if others did this - for example, {{Linebacker-1930s-stub}} could show itself at the top, and beneath that, Linebacker-stub, Amfoot-bio-stub etc. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:48, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Found one with four levels: {{Hungary-tennis-bio-stub}} - how is it done? --Redrose64 (talk) 17:53, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

It's done automatically from the hyphenated parts of the stub. Hungary-tennis-bio-stub minus Hungary = tennis-bio-stub, etc Amfoot-bio-stub should have bio-stub as a level because of that, but because there is no such thing as 1930s-stub Linebacker-1930s-stub doesn't have an extra level (if we'd named hit 1930s-linebacker-stub it would have linebacker-stub as a level). I don't think we've got any with five levels, but they're possible (we haven't yet got to stub types like {{1930s-US-comedy-film-stub}}). There's no easy way to do what you suggest other than renaming stub templates in a hierarchical way (which isn't that easy either). Grutness...wha? 22:52, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Weird... identical existing and non-existing stubs. Calling Dr. Heisenberg...

Anyone like to explain this to me? The earlier version (as at oct 25) had a redlink to an existing stub template. I replaced it with an identical link and it became an operating link. I can't see any difference in the two links, so why did one work and not the other? Or is there an uncertainly paradox with stubs suddenly? Grutness...wha? 03:08, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

The original link contained a non-printing character before the 'A'. Copying and pasting the links into a program with no or limited understanding of utf characters might show it up. - TB (talk) 08:08, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

In WordPad it shows as a tiny central dot. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:55, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Ahh... that explains it! Thanks! Grutness...wha? 18:12, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

RfD related to stub categories

Back in 2009, Pegship created a template called {{catupmerge}} for stub categories which are populated only by upmerged tags. I have moved it to a better name ({{Upmerged stub category}}) and nominated the redirect for deletion at WP:Redirects for discussion/Log/2011 January 2#Template:Catupmerge. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 20:07, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Project/help links in stub templates

What's the current guideline/rule-of-thumb about linking to projectsb and help pages in stub templates? I thought we were largely against them... in which case, {{academic-journal-stub}} may need amending. Thoughts? Grutness...wha? 01:08, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

As a general principle, the degree of coupling between encyclopedic and bureaucratic content should be minimised - ideally it would all go on the talk and/or hidden category pages. That said if we're willing to make an exception for messages about the quality of an article ("This article is a stub...") it seems churlish to not include advice on expanding it to would-be-editors. In the example presented, I'd say that the the additional message does not make the stub box any more intrusive than it already is. - TB (talk) 10:31, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Stub-sorting a minor edit?

Should stub sorting be marked as a minor edit? Rchard2scout (talk) 21:03, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Per Help:Minor edit#When not to mark an edit as a minor edit, third entry, no. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:16, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Hm. Interesting. I've always marked stub sorting changes as minor edits (and we're talking tens of thousands here...), as they do not affect either the text or the permanent templates or categories of the article. Grutness...wha? 22:58, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

Should the tags for nominating categories to be renamed be purple in stead of pink?

Feel free to participate in the discussion at Template talk:Cfd all#Should the tags for nominating categories to be renamed be purple in stead of pink?. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 08:27, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

HotCat issues

Hi, notifying the project of a thread which I have raised at Wikipedia talk:HotCat#Stub categories. If anybody uses HotCat (I don't), please offer suggestions for helping with the issue. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:20, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

Category empty

It seems to have been a long time since the category has been empty, so I'm proud to say that it is now... or was last time I looked. We've caught up with the flood of former {{expand}} articles which have been tagged with {{stub}}. Well done, to all of us who are actively sorting. And now I really must get on with the non-Wiki jobs I was going to do this morning ... I usually only aim at keeping the letter "P" in the listing empty, but the rest of the list was so short that I couldn't resist the challenge! PamD (talk) 12:06, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Delinking of templates

Hi folks - does anyone know what's going on with the de-linking of text in stub articles? It seems that User:Colonies Chris has started mass delinking of hundreds of templates. I don't remember that having been discussed here, and I would have thought that it was counterproductive. Grutness...wha? 22:28, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

See WT:STUB#Valueless links in stub templates and his talk page. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:50, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

There is an instance where he has broken the template, so I think advice needs to be provided on what he is doing.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Currencies_of_Asia&oldid=398418745 200.77.0.177 (talk) 16:01, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

In this one case I inadvertently broke the layout, for which I apologise. That doesn't affect the overall case for unlinking of common terms and duplicate links from stub templates. Colonies Chris (talk) 22:30, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Some of the terms you have unlinked are neither common terms nor duplicate links.

Consider this one: you delinked train station and England from {{EastEngland-railstation-stub}} - both of these are common terms and also terms which may occur in the main text of articles which bear this template (see Category:East of England railway station stubs). But you also delinked East of England, which is unlikely to occur anywhere in such articles; furthermore, it is not a common term. It has the appearance of a general term for that area of England which is on the right-hand side of a map; but it has a specific, legally defined meaning (follow the link to see exactly what), which we at WP:UKRAIL have chosen as a suitable way of subdividing railway stations in England. A station in, say, Lincolnshire, whilst in the east in a vague sort of way, is not in the East of England - it is in the East Midlands, and so stub articles on railway stations in Lincolnshire should bear {{EastMidlands-railstation-stub}}.

The presence of these links in both the stub templates and on the category pages assists in the proper selection of stub template without having to put great big explanations into the template documentation and category pages. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:54, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for explaining this usage, which I wasn't aware of. I'll tread more carefully around terms which might have very specific technical meanings such as this. Colonies Chris (talk) 17:09, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Note: Colonies Chris is still actively removing these links. Is this regarded as (a) useful, (b) useless or (c) detrimental? There is currently a protected edit request to delink song in {{song-stub}}. If anyone has an opinion on this please comment at Template talk:Song-stub. Thanks — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:41, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

UK Railway station stubs

There appears to be a problems with rail station stubs which have recently been sorted by region, by one user. Yesterday a new stub {{Lincolnshire-railstation-stub}} appeared and was added to Lincolnshire stations in addition to the region stub. Is this what is meant to be happening? Keith D (talk) 14:48, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Um. I may be the user referred to as "rail station stubs which have recently been sorted by region, by one user", but I'm definitely not the one who "added to Lincolnshire stations in addition to the region stub".

To set the context: over several months, I had noticed that a large number of the railway stations in Category:East of England railway station stubs were actually outside the East of England (which is a defined area). The bulk of the errors seemed to concern stations in Lincolnshire, which is mostly within the East Midlands (another defined area), for which Category:East Midlands railway station stubs would have been much more suitable (two unitary authorities in the north of the geographic county, North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire, fall within Yorkshire and the Humber (defined area again), therefore Category:Yorkshire and the Humber railway station stubs).

A few days ago, I decided to get it straightened out. Since I would be changing a large number of instances of {{EastEngland-railstation-stub}} to {{EastMidlands-railstation-stub}}, I first went through Category:East Midlands railway station stubs to make sure those were valid in their use of {{EastMidlands-railstation-stub}}, so that I wouldn't be piling good stuff upon cr*p. This took from 21:23 until 22:07 on 23 January 2011, with just eight articles amended.

I then set about Category:East of England railway station stubs and checked that the use of {{EastEngland-railstation-stub}} was valid. This took about two days, with dozens of fixes (some clown appeared to have used {{EastEngland-railstation-stub}} as a generic UK railway stub template, since I found stations in Brighton, the Isle of Sheppey, Warwickshire and the outskirts of Manchester and Doncaster all with this in error, also some lines and junctions which were not stations).

Re {{Lincolnshire-railstation-stub}} - I've already dropped a note at the creator's talk page. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:01, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Note that there's little point in an article having both templates - if the best option is to split by county-specific templates, then they would supersede the regional ones (otherwise we could have an article with Lincolnshire-, EastMidlands-, England-, UK-, and Europe-railstation-stub templates, which would be pretty ridiculous). Given the number of stub articles for stations in Lincolnshire, there should not be a separate category for Lincolnshire railway stations (it's below the standard 60-stub threshold), so unless that can be populated further with existing stubs, the new template -if kept - should be upmerged. Grutness...wha? 21:58, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the support. Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Proposals/2011/January#Category:Lincolnshire_railway_station_stubs created. (I can see it getting to 60 when the search is finished, but if it works then it should be emptyable) --Robert EA Harvey (talk) 06:22, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Problem with {{Dacia-stub}}

We seem to have problems with one editor redefining the use of {{Dacia-stub}}. I've already had to revert his attachment of it to stub articles on museums in Romania, and other things which relate to Romanian history in general but not necessarily or specifically to Dacia. He also seems to be unable to understand that redirects are never marked with stub templates. When I brought these subjects up with him, he decided to rescope the Dacia-stub template in a way that was far more vague and covered a far larger subject area, so that it could be applied to articles not directly related to Dacia. I'd appreciate it if people kept a bit more of an eye on Dacia-stub and its usage for a while, to make sure that it's being used properly! Grutness...wha? 07:25, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Please provide examples/your review as far as when the stub can be used. When I created this stub, I had the following kind of articles in my view for the scope: Dacian tows, tribes, kings etc, Dacian archaeology, culture, language etc. Since there are disputes whether or not Dacians and Getae are the same people or not (main stream and ancient source, indicate they are), the articles related to Getae are also in the scope of this stub. A similar situation is with Moesi, a Daco-Thracian tribe. Now, all the articles that me or other members of WP:DACIA marked with this stub, might not mention the word Dacia (although many do), but we know that those archaeologists or museums have a lot to do with Dacia and at least a section of the article will benefit from the expansion in that direction, hence the stub. I think the Dacia-related articles cannot be view in the narrow sense of: "geography of Dacia" (which is not even properly known as far as borders, being a lose term for a large area in Eastern Europe) or "is this museum in Dacia?", which are ridiculous. In other words, in my view, any article that fits in the Category:Dacia tree, should fit the bill for this stub.

Regarding redirects with {{R with possibilities}}, this is a special case, where I believe an exception can be made to the rule of not adding stubs to redirects. The suggestion of using stubs is clearly made in the description of this special type of redirect and I believe you should treat it as an exception case in your stub sorting procedures. It is logical to present a redirects with {{R with possibilities}} as a possible article for expansion. In the case of WP:DACIA, we make use of such redirects for ancient cities that redirect to the ancient history section of modern city (ex. Drobeta (ancient city), Napoca (ancient city) etc.) As part of our project we plan to expand the ancient history sections of the modern cities article, to the point where, the content will "overflow" naturally into the redirects with ancient city names. Hence, we want to have the stubs there to mark that, invite collaborators and speed up the process. I believe these kind of scenarios were in the mind of those who created {{R with possibilities}}.

Please refrain from removing our stubs until we at least clarify or ideally reach a consensus here. I think your sorting work is great, but please take in considerations the needs and views of specific projects. Thanks!--Codrin.B (talk) 18:40, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

To quote your original proposal of the stub type: "I propose the creation of a category/template Category:Ancient Dacia stubs/{{Ancient-Dacia-stub}} under History by era or under Category:European history stubs/{{Euro-hist-stub}}. There are many Dacia articles which are not fitting under the related Category:Romanian history stubs/{{Romania-hist-stub}} or Category:Ancient Thrace stubs/{{Ancient-Thrace-stub}} categories due to location or lack of connection, and would benefit from this stub/category. I am new to this and not sure how to count the amount of articles but as a contributor to Dacia-related pages, I can say I have seen more than 60, most of them poorly written or with limited content. The idea is to have them marked as a Dacia stub and distribute them to interested historians focused on Dacia/Dacology for contribution."

This seems to quite clearly state the aims you had for the stub template - to apply to articles which are specifically for Ancient Dacia and not coverable by a Romania-history-stub or Ancient-Thrace-stub. It was on these grounds that it was accepted as a stub type. As such, it is designed to complement the Romania-history-stub, and be used on articles which are not about Romanian history in general. Yet your complaints seem to relate to two articles which are specifically about Romanian history in general, and which are therefore more adequately and effectively covered by a Romania-history-stub - neither of which, it is worth noting, has a permanent category connected specifically with Dacia.

"Regarding redirects with {{R with possibilities}}, this is a special case, where I believe an exception can be made to the rule of not adding stubs to redirects." No, it is not a special case. It is a redirect, and stub templates are never used on redirects. As I have explained to you, it makes no sense whatsoever to have a stub template on something which can and will not be expanded - and redirects cannot be expanded, only replaced by articles. If the section to which it redirects can be expanded, then let it be so - but that does not require a stub template, it requires and {{expand-section}} stub. If the time comes when the section can bee broken out into its own article, then by that stage it will not be a stub. So there is simply no point in stubbing it. Furthermore, adding stub templates to redirects makes both the work of stub sorters and editors harder by clogging up categories designated for stubs. This makes it harder for editors to find specific articles to expand, and harder for tallying when stub categories are under- or oversized.

"The suggestion of using stubs is clearly made in the description of this special type of redirect and I believe you should treat it as an exception case in your stub sorting procedures." It is not stated as such in the template, the template's documentation, the template's talk page, or in the description of how to use redirects. And it is explicitly stated at WP:STUB that stub templates should not be used in cases like this.

"In the case of WP:DACIA, we make use of such redirects for ancient cities that redirect to the ancient history section of modern city (ex. Drobeta (ancient city), Napoca (ancient city) etc.) [...] Hence, we want to have the stubs there to mark that, invite collaborators and speed up the process. I believe these kind of scenarios were in the mind of those who created {{R with possibilities}}" As explained before - and again, as explained at WP:STUB - you are confusing the role of stub templates and WikiProject-specific banner templates. Stubs are not specifically for the use of individual subject-specific WikiProjects - they are for use across the entirety of Wikipedia in as uniform a fashion as possible. If WikiProjects want to mark their articles - and their redirects - they use talk-page banner templates, which are more effective and versatile, as they can be used on a wide range of different pages and not just on stubs. That is what those templates are for! You already have and use such a template, {{Ancient Dacia}}, and as far as your WP is concerned the stub template should be secondary to that. And I am certain that the people who created {{R with possibilities}} were doing so to point out redirects which could possibly be turned into articles (which is, after all, what the template states that it is for), rather than suggesting that the redirects were stubs, which they are clearly not.

"Please refrain from removing our stubs until we at least clarify or ideally reach a consensus here. I think your sorting work is great, but please take in considerations the needs and views of specific projects." They are not "your" stubs. they are Wikipedia's as a whole, and form part of a unified system that should treat all stub types equally and uniformly. Specific projects are far better served with banner templates, which is why they should be used for marking any Dacia-related articles and pages, be they stubs, full articles, redirects, templates, or categories. I advise you again to read WP:STUB#Stub types, WikiProjects, and Assessment templates. Grutness...wha? 21:37, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

The geographic scope of this Wikiproject doesn't seem limited to Romania. The scope given is "Dacia (at Burebista's time) plus Moesia and Scythia Minor". That would include areas of Bulgaria, Hungary, the Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Serbia and the Ukraine. I am not certain if the articles should even mention Dacians, since the Getae, the Moesi, and to a lesser extent the Thracians are of interest to the Wikiproject. Museums which cover related artifacts may or may not qualify. The scope doesn't mention them.

I fully agree on not marking common redirects as stubs. "stub", "start", "B", etch. are assesment evaluations of where an article currently stands. They should not serve as to do lists. "Non-article pages, such as disambiguation pages, categories, templates, talk pages, and redirects, are not regarded as stubs." Dimadick (talk) 16:35, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the further clarifications and suggestions. You keep saying that nowhere it is mentioned to use stubs in the redirects, but here is the phrase I seen and followed as a suggestion in {{R with possibilities}}: perhaps add a stub template or two to the redirect page as well.. I'll stay away from using stubs in redirects, but perhaps you fine folks at stub sorting should work with the creators of those redirect templates and get on the same page, before picking on me. I see the point of using {{Romania-hist-stub}} in some cases instead of {{Dacia-stub}}. However, please bear in mind, per Dimandick clarifications as well, that the Dacia was not limited to the territory of modern Romania. It included regions from many surrounding countries, so Romania-history-stub is not a good idea in those cases.

The reason I mentioned the scope of WP:DACIA in the context of the stub, is not because I confuse the project templates with the stubs, but because the concepts of Dacia and Dacians are not that straightforward and clear, and that page is trying to clarify the situation. Of course the stub is for everyone in WP, it is not just part of the project.

--Codrin.B (talk) 01:51, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Hm -apologies. I'd assumed when you said that it was mentioned at the template that it would be somewhere in the documentation (surely the normal place to list details of template usage) or on the documentation's talk page, rather than on the template itself. Looks like someone amended details of the template's use at some point without checking whether they conflicted with other guidelines. Grutness...wha? 22:41, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Asian painters

We have Category:Asian painter stubs but there is no corresponding {{Asia-painter-stub}}. Not all Asian countries have their own stub template (i.e. India has {{India-painter-stub}} but Sri Lanka does not have {{SriLanka-painter-stub}}, so I've ended up with the rather kludgy pair of stub templates at the bottom of Solias Mendis). Is the lack of a generic {{Asia-painter-stub}} an oversight, or was it a deliberate omission? --Redrose64 (talk) 15:33, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

WOP:WSS is slowly edging away from continent-wide stub types for things which have an obvious, specific nationality.A lot of painter stubs have only just been created/are in the provcessof creation, but for many countries there simply isn't enough call for them as they'd only have a couple of stubs, so double stubbing with national bio-stub and {{Painter-stub}} is the thing to do. If you think there's likely to be enough use for a specific SriLanka-artist-stub or SriLanka-painter-stub, then proposing one would make sense and - if you're right - I doubt there'd be any objections to its creation. Grutness...wha? 21:45, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Page redirect and upcoming task

Two thoughts:

1) I think it would make sense to redirect Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals to this talk page. The other page isn't used much - and when it is it's often incorrectly used to propose stub articles. Mostly the same people watch both pages, so are there any objections? I've made the same suggestion at that page, BTW. It might also be worth considering the same thing with the Discoveries talk page, though that does at least get a reasonable amount of comments.

2) Some tim in the next couple of months we should have a think - and a discussion with WP:WikiProject Sudan - about splitting the stubs for that nation into its two new constituent parts. This can wait a while, especially since no-one is certain what the new country is going to be called, but it's justy a general heads-up that we'll need to do something about the stubs for it. Grutness...wha? 00:25, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Redirecting done (per discussion on WT:WSS/P) Grutness...wha? 22:58, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Continental delineation

When separating countries into continents, what is the current accepted standard? Are we going with the United Nations geoscheme? Or something else?

I realize this can vary under certain conditions. For instance, I know that the association football categories prefer to delineate according to the ruling football organizations (which put Australia in Asia, and Isreal in Europe, amongst other oddities). But, in general, what is the standard?

Examples of concerns:

{{Turkey-party-stub}} is currently under Category:European political party stubs
{{Azerbaijan-election-stub}} is currently under Category:European election stubs
The various subcategories under Category:Africa geography stubs go into lengthy explanations as to what will happen if we adopt the UN geoscheme, instead of just appying the geoscheme.

Before I make any changes, I just wanted some clear direction on where the community wants to go. Dawynn (talk) 13:18, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Turkey is a funny one. It spans two continents: most is in Asia, but the area north-west of the Bosphorus/Sea of Marmara/Dardanelles, bordering Greece and Bulgaria, is in Europe. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:53, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

The examples I provided were meant to be just that -- examples. I understand that it is not easy to delineate between Asia and Europe. That's why I was hoping that we could point to some kind of standard as far as how these things should be decided. I was suggesting the UN as an external guiding force in these decisions.

What do we do with the Caucasus regions? Is Cyprus more closely aligned with Greece / Europe? or Turkey / Asia? (Note: Cyprus is part of the EU, but UN geoscheme still lists them in Asia) Does Egypt align more with Africa, or more with the middle-east / Western Asia? Is Mexico more closely aligned with Central America, or Northern American as would be suggested by its inclusion in NAFTA?

Again, these are not intended as a complete list of questions, but just a small set of examples. The big question here is, is there a standard we can point to that can decide these questions? Dawynn (talk) 15:02, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Any news on auto-recategorization?

Can anyone point me to news related to auto-categorization in wikipedia? I'm meaning the feature that, when we move a template to a new category, will automatically move all the associated articles to the new category. This was shut off or broken with the software upgrade last month and has not been turned back on / fixed. Dawynn (talk) 12:59, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Join the party at Help:Job queue#Where's it gone?. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:32, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Stubs included directly in stub categories

In October, I mentioned Wikipedia:Database reports/Stubs included directly in stub categories. I started working through this list on 9 June 2010 (when there were 2339 entries), and since then, I've fixed up almost everything from G to S, whilst others have covered A to F and T to Z. I believe that the list generated 13 February 2011 is now clear, so I've asked MZMcBride (talk · contribs) (the operator of BernsteinBot (talk · contribs)) to run the report as a special job, to see what, if anything, is left. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:41, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Good idea. It's probably worth running a report every month or so on this anyway, since no doubt new stubs will continue to be added in this way (unfortunately). Grutness...wha? 22:07, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

As things stand, it's run automatically on 13th of each month, but BernsteinBot can occasionally do a special run: it did one on 25 October 2010 because the report run on 13 Oct was miles bigger than it should have been (1668 entries 13 Sept 2010, 5210 entries 13 Oct 2010, 1601 entries 25 Oct 2010) as a side-effect of this business which produced pages like this. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:38, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately, new articles keep popping up each month. From the 2/13/11 report, everything got addressed except for G-H. Dawynn (talk) 11:46, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

My apologies -- I hadn't checked for a few days. Looks like you may have already done the work. Dawynn (talk) 12:24, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I'm aware that new pages are added every month: back in June 2010 I started off with the later Js and all the Ks (why? because those were top of page 2 which is what I picked as my start point), and every month have fixed up the new pages in my chosen range first, before proceeding down the list, one more letter each month (or two per month for short letters like Q). Each month, there were always additional Ks, as well as more for the other letters that I'd cleared. By 12 February I'd cleared the whole of the J-S range but certainly didn't expect the 13 February run to have nothing between the Is and the Ts.

Following the 13 February run, I did all the newly-added pages in the J-S range, then noticing that somebody else was working on the T-Z range (I think all were newly-added pages), I went back to an did all the Is; in the meantime, somebody started at the top, but seemed to have given up round about Gare de Guillerval.

Over the last three days I did the remaining Gs plus all the Hs, and that is why I believe that everything on the 13 February list is sorted; and in turn that's why I have requested a rerun: so that we can see what the present situation is. I know it won't be completely clear whether run as a special now or automatically on 13 March: I am sure that it never will be signed off as a completed task. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:39, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

The special run has recently (13:46, 02 March 2011) been completed, and there are 83 entries on it. Since most, if not all, will have been edited in the last two/three weeks to add the stub cat directly, the action should be fresh in the mind of the editors concerned, so we can judiciously serve out some {{Uw-directcat}}. If it was added by HotCat, there's a thread at WT:HotCat#Stub categories that we can complain at. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:46, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Thoughts on standardizing subcategory listings

I've been having a discussion with another member of the team as to how subcategories should be listed within a category. We were discussing basically two patterns, both of which I've seen used. I'm just wondering if there is some concensus as to what is perceived as the best way to do things. For ease of future discussion, I'm going to give them a couple names here.

Default: Under this method, subcategories act much like regular articles, but in their own part of the category listing. That is, under, say, Category:Gastropod stubs, the Caenogastropoda would be listed under 'C', Heterobranchia would be listed under 'H'. If the category flows to multiple pages, the categories would flow with the articles. That is, 'H' categories would be found on whatever page the 'H' articles are on. Called the default because, unless Wikipedia is strictly told to file a subcategory somewhere else, this is how it will handle things.
First Page Only (FPO): Under this method, we tweak the category specifications so that all subcategories are listed alphabetically under the asterisk. The effect is that all categories are alphabetized, but only show up on the first page. If the category flows to multiple pages, you will not see any categories on the overflow pages.

It's understood that, on both of these methods, we may alter the alphabetization rules as need arises. For example, "Hungarian botanist stubs" may be listed in the 'B' subcategories (for Botanist) on a "Hungarian scientist stubs" page, while being listed in the 'H' subcategories on a "Botanist stubs" page.

The main question here is whether we have or whether we want to set any kind of project standard for how subcategories should be listed. Thank you all in advance for your input. Dawynn (talk) 16:04, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

From my own observations, the "default" method is by far in the minority, so if we do decide to harmonise, then the smallest change would be away from this rather than towards it.

As for the "first page only" method, some stub cats group under asterisk, some under space. I haven't really noticed a pattern, nor does one of these two seem to be favoured over the other. However, in some cases, both are used: for example, in Category:British Columbia stubs, space is used for non-geographical sub categories, and asterisk is used for the geographical areas. Similarly, in Category:California geography stubs, space is used for the general sub-cats (airports, roads) and asterisk is for the specific areas.

I find that when stub sorting, it's most helpful to have the sub-cats together on first page. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:41, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Redrose is right - It's long been standard to have them listed on the first page, and whenever I (or, I'm sure, most of theother long-term stub sorters here) come across a category that isn't, I pipe it to the front page. There are two distinct ways of piping, though, either with a space or with an asterisk, and both are used - deliberately. Sometimes a category is split on two different axes, and an asterisk is used for one and a space for the other. Category:Africa stubs is another good example - an asterisk is used for geographical divisions, a space for other divisions. Grutness...wha? 21:41, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

If the purpose of piping everything to the first page of the listing is so that it's all visible immediately, there are other ways of achieving that goal, such as adding the {{Category tree}} box to the category page. (And that one has the advantage that it's not only visible on the first page.) I realise that the piping habit probably started before things like that were available, but there's no good reason – unless "it's already been done that way on most of the pages" is a good reason – to keep on doing it. —Paul A (talk) 07:14, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Update The categorisation changed a few days ago, rendering some of the above arguments invalid.

Previously, if a cat had (say) 26 sub-cats and 380 member pages, both being evenly distributed through the Latin alphabet, then the first page of the cat would display 13 sub-cats A-M and beneath those there would be 187 (ie 200-13) pages, also A-M; the second cat page would be 13 sub-cats N-Z and 187 pages N-Z, and the third page would have 6 (ie 380-187-187) pages.

Now (for the same example of 26 & 380), all the 26 sub-cats A-Z are displayed on all pages, and beneath that are 200 pages on page 1, and 180 on page 2.

Therefore, the need to sort stub cats under " " or "*" when placed in other stub cats is somewhat reduced. See, for example, Category:History stubs where Category:Romanian history stubs is sorted under "R" yet appears on the first page, and all those sorted under " " or "*" appear on the page beginning at "R". --Redrose64 (talk) 20:22, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting#Search tool needed

Does anyone know of an existing search tool that could find templates that are either missing a specific parameter, or where said parameter is present but has no value?

I'd like to be able to search for all {{Stub category}} templates that have nothing in the newstub parameter -- since this should either be filled in or the template should be converted to {{Parent-only stub category}}. I'd also like to search for all {{Stub category}}, {{Parent-only stub category}} and {{Regional stub category}} templates that have nothing in the category parameter, as we should be trying to fill all of these in.

Dawynn (talk) 15:17, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't know of any, other than running a SQL query on the database (which I don't have the necessary rights for).

When I need to do something like this, I typically set up a tracking category. That is, I would amend the template concerned to test for the relevant parameter being either blank or absent, and if so, categorise the page into a specially-created category. See Category:Unusual parameters of Infobox station template whose present purpose is to detect various usages or misusages of the |line= parameter in {{Infobox UK disused station}}. If you like, I'll sandbox something at Template:Stub category/sandbox. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:47, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

That would be cool! It would also allow for a dynamically updated page (in this case a category) where anyone could review what may need attention. Would such a thing automatically backfill? That is, would it go back and review the templates that already exist? Or just the ones saved in the future? Dawynn (talk) 01:12, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I hadn't actually looked inside {{stub category}} when I typed the above. I have now looked, and it seems that this is already set up, although not in the way that I would have done it; the feature was added with these edits: 1 (missing |category=); 2 (missing |newstub=). Rather than explain it here, I've added it to the documentation at Template:Stub category/doc#Missing parameters.

Regarding missing |category= in {{Parent-only stub category}} and {{Regional stub category}}, this isn't checked, although it could be. The question then is, do you want to use the same method that Od Mishehu (talk · contribs) used, or my method?

Regarding your question "Would such a thing automatically backfill", the answer is yes, although it does depend on the job queue. The good news there is that after about three weeks of non-movement, it's now clear (or as near as makes no odds: there are 38 pending jobs compared to 10,000 times that amount a week ago). --Redrose64 (talk) 13:00, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I would go for consistency across all three, with documentation in the templates (like you added). I'm not picky as to how we achieve consistency. I would suggest that all three should be checked for a valid value for both "article", and "category", and the main "Stub category" and "Regional stub category" should also be checked for "newstub". One of the defining characteristics of the "Parent-only stub category" is that there is no "newstub" value. Dawynn (talk) 20:58, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I hadn't looked at the code, but I assumed that the intent of the {{Regional stub category}} was to be a replica of {{Stub category}}, but to add all categories with the regional template to Category:Stubs by region. For that matter, I thought the intent of {{Parent-only stub category}} was to be a replica of {{Stub category}}, with the exception of not allowing for "newstub", and adding some extra text to define what a parent-only stub category means. I'd suggest bringing all three back in line so that they are different where they need to be, but identical where they have no need to be different. Dawynn (talk) 21:06, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I've brought {{regional stub category}} into line with {{stub category}} by the simple expedient of checking which parameters the latter recognises and making sure that they're all passed straight through unchanged (two weren't: |category type= and |WikiProject=). I've also linked {{regional stub category}} to template:stub category/doc and in doing so made the doc page amend itself slightly depending upon the template it's being viewed in.

Nothing done on {{parent-only stub category}} yet: we might want to wait for input from Grutness (talk · contribs), who wrote it. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:57, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

(stirring in his sleep) hm-wha? I'm happy with whatever you see fit. No real thoughts either way, though it does make sense to have them all consistent. Grutness...wha? 22:51, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Done OK, have added two tracking pages to {{Parent-only stub category}}, see its documentation. It may take an hour or so to fully populate the "What links here" pages. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:31, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Categorizing {{encyclopedia-stub}} in WikiProject Stub sorting

Should {{encyclopedia-stub}} be under the category of Culture or Miscellaneous? I tried finding it in Culture and Miscellaneous; no sign of this stub template. --Gh87 (talk) 09:14, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

It should be under the other subtypes of Category:Book stubs, which IIRC are under culture. Grutness...wha? 21:53, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Category renaming

Hello. Category:Slovakian sport stubs should be renamed to "Slovak sport stubs", to reflect the common usage of adjective "Slovak" in other categories throughout WP. - Darwinek (talk) 10:26, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Sounds like the sort of thing that you should propose atr WP:SFD... Grutness...wha? 23:47, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Image size on stub templates

I've noticed that Fry1989 (talk · contribs) has been increasing the size of images from 30px to 60px or greater (120px in one case); is this alright? I think this makes them too big to cooperate with other stub templates and leaves alot of undesirable whitespace above and below the stub description when sandwiching multiple stub templates together. I tried to revert Template:Comoros-geo-stub, but he restored the very large image. Atleast one other editor has reverted Fry1989 besides myself on some stub templates, so I don't think I'm alone in supposing this is excessively large decoration. 65.93.12.101 (talk) 10:45, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

From Template:Asbox/doc#pix:

The size of the image in pixels (no need to append px). Only required if image is used and this image requires a size different from the default maximum of 40x30 pixels. (Note that in the interests of standardising the formats of stub messages, images of size 40x30 are much preferred.)

So, using another size is not prohibited. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:09, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

It's worth pointing out, though that in general the only times that the 30x40 or 40x30 dimensions are not used is if the image is of unusual format (e.g., maps of countries), and even then 50p tends to be regarded as a maximum. 60px is far too big, and 120px is enormous. Grutness...wha? 20:51, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

More comments desperately needed

More people commenting are needed at WP:SFD. Often, nominations are being closed with only the nominator commenting, or being left open through one nomination comment and one opposing comment cancelling each other out with no consensus being reached. Personally, I don't care whether the comments are in support or opposing the nominations in each case - it would just be easier to reach consensus on some of the nominations if there was more comment. Anyone? Grutness...wha? 23:13, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Mfd for Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub removal

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub removal. Thank you. --Klein zach 01:49, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Indian Youth Party

INDIAN YOUTH PARTY is a political party with its headquarter at Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. INDIAN YOUTH PARTY bears true faith and allegiance to the constitution of India as by law established and to the principal of socialism, secularism and democracy and would uphold the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India.

The flag of party is tricolor with saffron on top, white at the middle and green at bottom. The flag is one and halftimes to its width. The loin is printed boldly in black color on the white portion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.162.217.131 (talk) 17:31, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

I want to create a new stub...about a travel company

I want to create a new stub about a travel company called Sri Lanka In Style. Does anyone have any advice about how to do this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.43.2.234 (talk) 06:54, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

You want Wikipedia:Articles for creation, which deals with creating stub articles - this page is for people who sort stubs, as it explains at the top of the page. Grutness...wha? 11:20, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

A suggestion re-relisting at SFD

(Crossposted from WT:SFD)

A suggestion for WP:SFD. We don't normally re-list nominations - they just hang around at the bottom of the page until someone gets fed up with them and closes them. I'd like to propose the following:

If discussion is continuing, an item should be kept at the bottom of the page if no clear outcome or best course of action has emerged on the stub type under discussion
If there has been no new comment on an item for a month and there is still no clear outcome or best course of action, it should be re-listed, per the normal methods on CFD and other process pages, in order to gain more comments.

Most of the time, clarity of action - if not always consensus - is reached. In other cases, such as the current US-history-book-stub discussion, they can hand around unresolved for a long time. Hopefully this will keep the ball rolling on a couple of items every now and again. Grutness...wha? 22:17, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

Okay, since there were no objections, i've gone ahead and relisted the sticking nom, using two new templates - {{sfd relist top}} and {{sfd relist bottom}}. Grutness...wha? 00:03, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

strange new template

Template:Small-village-of-about-1,000-inhabitants-in-Kent-stub seems to be quite off the wall but I can't quite work out what to do with it - TfD or just mention it here and hope that someone will leap in and sort it out? PamD (talk) 13:19, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, you certainly wouldn't TfD it - stub templates go to SfD. But it certainly needs deleting. Grutness...wha? 00:32, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Upmerged categories and stub types lists

Should stub templates that correspond to stub categories which have been upmerged be listed in the various 'Stub types' lists? If so, how? For an example, see the Posavina Canton geography stub category or the multiple red-linked Silesian geography stub types (scroll down a bit), which were upmerged due to being underpopulated. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 03:55, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Ping. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 00:14, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Not sure I fully understand the question as I don't see your examples, but usually I list the upmerged templates on the line after the category. I would list them under every category they are upmerged to. Does this answer the question? Severo^TC 08:32, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

It seems they've been dealth with already as I could not find them either; but yes, that does answer my question. Thank you, -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 16:40, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Red dwarf

Template:Red-dwarf-stub refers to the hundreds of articles that have to do with red or orange dwarfs. I have a list of red dwarf stubs on the wiki page. Let me know when we can use the red dwarf template. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Clammybells (talk • contribs) 11:33, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Um, you did read WP:STUB, where iut says that templates should not be made until they have been proposed and vetted? This is an incorrectly named template which needs to go through an SFD process and should not be used. Grutness...wha? 23:22, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Mea culpa - it was proposed, but during the proposal it was indicated that this was not the appropriate name for the template. It still needs correctly naming before it can be used. Grutness...wha? 23:34, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

The problem seems to be that you created the template nine minutes after proposing it. The proposal and vetting period takes several days, as explained at the top of WP:WSS/P. Grutness...wha? 23:38, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

Irish restaurant

How do I stub-sort an Irish restaurant? See Category:European restaurant stubs which doesn't help - it forbids me putting it into that category, but none of the 3 subcategories are relevant. It seems ridiculous to just use {{restaurant-stub}} undivided. Maybe it's too early in the morning, but I just can't think what to do with this. PamD (talk) 07:39, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

This is related to the problem I described at #Asian painters above, and I suspect that for now you'll need to dual-tag it - use either {{Ireland-org-stub}} or {{Ireland-struct-stub}} together with {{restaurant-stub}}. It's kind of a half-assed solution I know. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:12, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

There are several cases like this where individual country templates simply haven't been made proposed/yet - hopefully it's only a temporary problem and there will soon be templates like {{Ireland-restaurant-stub}} to fix the problem. Grutness...wha? 00:55, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

stub category empty at last

It's been quite a while since the category has been empty, but it is now - congratulations to all of us for gettting through a lot of stubs lately. PamD (talk) 09:28, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Categorization of stub categories

I've noticed something over the last few days. Previously, stub categories had been categorized in the permcats under the greek 'µ' character. Now, they still get listed at the end of the categories, but under a capital 'M'. How do we fix this? Dawynn (talk) 12:33, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 87#categorically random categories. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:17, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Not a capital M (Latin) but capital Μ (Greek). They look the same in both the edit pane and the rendered text (at least in Firefox 3.6.15 under Win XP), but if you follow those links, you'll see that they're different. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:58, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Would replacing it with a lower case mu solve the problem? Grutness...wha? 20:59, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I think that would require a MediaWiki change. We're still categorising stub cats under μ in non-stub cats, but whereas this μ was previously left as-is for category display, the recent changes mean that the alphabetical headers are all capitalised, so μ becomes Μ, similarly β and τ become Β and Τ - even when this makes several pairs of headers look the same. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:14, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

How can we press for the required change, then? It looks absurd to have an apparent "M" filing after Z, while we could all see and understand that "μ" was something different. PamD (talk) 23:10, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Well that certainly is a bizarre outcome, but does look like a correct 'capitalization' of the Greek character mu (http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/symbols.html), if that's the algorithm in place. If I might question an assumption, what is the significance of having stubs sorted under 'mu'? Is it an arbitrary selection to have it sorted after the letters? If so, why not a caret (^) or a tilde (~)?Cander0000 (talk) 03:53, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

New subpages for {{Stub category}}

Not sure why, but we've suddenly acquired two new subpages for {{Stub category}}: {{Stub category/testcases}} and {{Stub category/sandbox}}. I've asked the creator of them to comment here as to their usage, but given the different ways in which the cateory is already in use, I doubt we really need these - or if we do, don't really see why one subpage couldn't be used to serve both purposes (what is a sandbox other than a place to experiment with test cases?). Grutness...wha? 02:06, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Since it's a protected template, it is a normal procedure to work out any proposed template code changes first on a subpage in a sandbox, and to use the coordinating testcases page to test both the current code and the code in the sandbox. Please see Wikipedia:Template documentation#/sandbox and /testcases for further instructions regarding these types of subpages. In regards to the proposed changes for the template, discussions are usually held on that specific template's talk page. See: Template talk:Stub category#Edit request to fix spacing for further information. --Funandtrvl (talk) 03:36, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm. Looks like this template missed out on having {{WPSS-talk}} put at the top of it. Apologies Funandtrvl. Grutness...wha? 01:11, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

I appreciate the apology, and thanks for adding it to the template's talk page!! --Funandtrvl (talk) 19:15, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Listing all the proposals

Is there any need to list all the past proposals (certainly any that are more than a month old)? Huge lag when this page loads. Lugnuts (talk) 19:44, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Then just load the current month! That's one of the reasons it's divided into sections. And there are still a few items from past months that are active, so it makes sense to have them here. Perhaps we should have a "cover page" like WP:CFD does so you can load the lot or just one month more easily... Grutness...wha? 00:24, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

How do I do that? I link in from WP:STUB and then click on the link for Proposals in the infobox. Lugnuts (talk) 07:45, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Mmmm. I do it from my watchlist by watching each current month subpage as it arrives. There should be a link from WP:STUB though. I'll see what I can do. Grutness...wha? 00:02, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Done. The WSS navbox at the top of the page now has a "current month" link for both WSS/P and WSS/D. Grutness...wha? 00:13, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Lugnuts (talk) 13:51, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

New stub not showing correctly

I've created Template:Kerry-GAA-club-stub but it's not showing the stub hierarchy correctly. Any ideas? Gnevin (talk) 23:47, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

That's because the stub hierarchy is done automatically and you haven't used the same format as the higher-level stub. the template should be at {{Kerry-gaelic-games-club-stub}}, to match {{gaelic-games-club-stub}} - (either that or we need to move {{gaelic-games-club-stub}} to {{GAA-club-stub}}, which might be a better solution). Grutness...wha? 02:40, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Makes sense Gnevin (talk) 09:13, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

I've nominated the gaelic-games type stubs for renaming at WP:SFD. Grutness...wha? 11:08, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Proposal archive page

I see that the proposal archive page had not been updated for some time. Is this simply because no one had the time, or is there some other reason why the updates stopped? I put up a June 2009 archive list, but figured I'd check before I went too far with this. Feel free to add any feedback on how I handled the June 2009 archive. Dawynn (talk) 18:15, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Things ain't as bad as they seem :)

In case you - like me - are sometimes disheartened by the seemingly endless number of undersized stub cats which need upmerging or oversized cats which need splitting, this graphic may cheer you up. Using the 9 March data at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub type sizes, I made a graph showing approximately how many stub cats there are of different sizes. Only the red areas on the graph definitely need work: the lower yellow area contains cats which might need looking at - undersized, but either passably populated, or with a WikiProject, or with enough subcategories to warrant keeping them - the upper yellow area is those which are closing in on the upper limit before splitting. The vast bulk of the categories are within our "Goldilocks zone" of 60-800 stubs. Of course, the remaining small fraction is still 1600 of the 11,000 stub categories... Grutness...wha? 23:12, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

A couple comments here:

This was compiled at a time when the Job Queue was having issues and we were renaming a number of categories. So, new categories were being built, but the job queue was not populating them correctly. Thus, the number of small categories was inflated.
The number of small categories in the graph here is further inflated because the graph does not take subcategories into account. A category could have 20 subcategories, all of appropriate size, but if there are only 10 articles in the parent category, it will still be counted among the 600 smalls.

All things considered, there are less than 200 categories with less than 30 articles and no subcategories. There are around 600 categories in the 30-60 range (no subcategories). Dawynn (talk) 19:31, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Even better, then! I'll update the image, too, given that there's a new data-dump. Grutness...wha? 01:50, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

New version uploaded, this time showing how many of the smaller categories are parents of subcats. Grutness...wha? 02:23, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

September 2009 update

I'm currently trying to bring the archive up to date. Could someone please review Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals/2009/September? There are two discussions that I didn't close, because there didn't seem to be a true concensus. Can someone else please provide a final decision on the remaining open discussions? Dawynn (talk) 12:34, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

I've closed one, but the retail/market one looks pretty messy - may be better to re-propose it? Grutness...wha? 02:14, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Related: Could someone more familiar than I am with stub sorting close the remaining few discussions at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals/2010/May so the backlog tag can be removed? Thanks! –Drilnoth (T/C) 15:17, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Why all these templates?

Why are we using so many different stub templates? Wouldn't using {{stub}} with an unnamed parameter to specify the type be better, and more consistent with the rest of the wiki? E.g., {{Stub|Bombus}} would do the same thing as {{Bombus-stub}}. It wouldn't be very hard to code, and then things could be done by bot or redirects to update previous uses. –Drilnoth (T/C) 15:21, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Archive 16#Multiple stub templates on the same page? where this (or a very similar issue) was last discussed. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:06, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the link! That's similar, but primarily about using multiple stub templates via parameters of one template. I'm thinking more of just changing the way the stubs are tagged, in a way which would not interfere with stub sorting or the like because there would still be a separate stub template on each page for each applicable stub type. (I also saw that server load issues were mentioned in that discussion, because then if {{Stub}} was edited a massive number of page updates would be needed. That is no different from now if {{Asbox}} is updated). –Drilnoth (T/C) 16:22, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Asbox has about 10 different items in its switch statements. Stub would have a lot more. A lot more (one for every stub type). And you'd need to include a switch both for the category and the display. Trust me, it's very difficult to regulate to that level. People will come up with all kinds of variants (e.g. video game vs video games vs Video Games, and so forth), and so we'd have red linked categories and pages and what not all over the place. You can eliminate some of that variability by adding an {{lc:}}, but even then you'd have to deal with at least 2 items in a switch statement for every stub.

This is simply implausible. --Izno (talk) 19:58, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

It wouldn't need a massive switch. Instead, each stub type would have a subpage of {{Stub}}, and the parent template would just call that sub-template based on the stub name. To continue my prior example, {{Stub/Bombus}} would hold the real stub template, and it would be called by {{Stub|Bombus}}. Much cleaner than using so many template visibly, and no giant switch. Anyways, 'twas just a thought. If people are happy with the overabundance of templates as things stand, I don't really care either way. –Drilnoth (T/C) 20:09, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Also, using one simple paranetered template, though it sounds good in theory, would also cause major problems for stub sorters. We often use a template's "what links here" tool to check on its usage - that would be rendered impossible with a parametered template. We can also pretty near instantly tell if a particular stub template has a problem, or whether a whole group of templates have the same problem - with a parameterised template, that would be far harder to do. Also, with the current system, any mistyping of a template's name during editing shows up as a red link, alerting the editor to the mistake; with a parameterised template, it would appear as a blue link and the editor wouldn't know of the error. As such, stubs could "disappear" from their official categories. Grutness...wha? 01:06, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Grutness, I think you are misunderstanding Drilnoth's latest comment - (s)he's now asking for soething along the lines of {{Multiple stub}}, which a user actually tried to create and got deleted at Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion/Log/2010/December/1.

Drilnoth, if I understand you correctly, please read the arguments in that discussion (Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion/Log/2010/December/1. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 10:02, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

I have no interest in a "Multiple stub" sort of template. I was simply asking about the possibility of standardizing stubs to use one main template rather than the hundreds (thousands?) which there are now. –Drilnoth (T/C) 13:15, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Prefixing subcategory sortkeys

Currently, when categorizing stub categories in their stub parents, we prefix either a space or an astertisk (*) to the category name. We originally did this in order that the subcategories would all show up on the first page; however, now they show up on every page, making it unnecessary. I think that we should:

In stub categories not yet containing subcats, not use these prefixes any more - just categorize directly.
Over time, in stub categories where we don't use these prifixes to split the subcats into different groups (we do, for example, in Category:Scientist stubs to separate between geographic divisions and subject divisions), remove these prefixes from stub categories.

עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 09:56, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Also see #Thoughts on standardizing subcategory listings above. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:56, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

There are still teething problems with the "&pageuntil" sorting (try going to a later page that shows all categories and then hitting "previous 200"). While I like the principle of doing away with the sortkeys where we don't split on two axes, perhaps we'd better wait until those problems are sorted out first? Grutness...wha? 00:03, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

I just went to Category:Graham Land, which has 16 subcategories (including a stub category, all the way at the end) and 781 articles; I went to the second page, then clicked on the "Previous" link (and got to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Graham_Land&pageuntil=Diamonen+Island), and got all the subcategoris. The category section is governed by a different query string parameter - subcatuntil (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Gastropod_families&subcatuntil=Goniaeolididae). עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 05:24, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Heh - the category I'm currently working on. Try this. Go to that folder, then go to from H using the alphabet at the top. Then go to next page. Rather than giving you "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Graham_Land&from=Noire+Rock" it gives you "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Graham_Land&from=H&pagefrom=Noire+Rock". Now try going back two pages using the previously button. You can't. It goes back one, to "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Graham_Land&from=H&pageuntil=Noire+Rock", but if you try to go back further nothing happens. Grutness...wha? 01:30, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

New project template

I would appreciate others to review / improve new template {{WSSProposalArchive}}.

I created this new template for navigation of the Proposal Archives. I will soon be starting the 2010 archives, and the template did not exist previously (navigation menu previously recreated on each individual archive page). I have updated the existing proposal archive pages to use this template. However, if someone else has better ideas as to the syntax / layout / etc, please feel free to improve it. Dawynn (talk) 13:45, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Have AWB automaticly replace template:catupmerge

{{catupmerge}} was a template originally created by Pegship, until about half a year ago I moved it to a better name, {{upmerged stub category}}. I was thinking that since the new name is more descriptive of what this template is for, that we should maybe list it at Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Template redirects - this means that any time any user tries to edit a category with a {{catupmerge}} tag on it using AWB, AWB will automaticly add this replacement to the edit. This doesn't mean that anyone will edit the pages for the purpose of handling this tag; only that should anyone do an AWB edit, they probably will end up doing this. Any opinions on this issue? עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 07:05, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Hidden navbar on stub templates

Currently, a hidden navbar is generated on each of our 1.5 million stubs. To see the navbar, an editor must modify his/her own .css file. Currently, we have 5 editors who have done this. There is some discussion at Template talk:Asbox#Why the navbar ? about this feature. - TB (talk) 08:21, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Possible overlinking in bio stubs

There are several open requests for editing protected biography stub templates (example), all asking the removal of wikilinks to the word 'biography' and to the name of the subject's country. The argument repeated in each are that 'biography' is a common word that requires no link, and the subject's country is likely to already be linked somewhere in the article body. These requests seem reasonable, but since there were several and I know the individual stub templates will not have many watchers, I wanted to raise the issue here to make sure there are no objections prior to acting on the edit requests. If there is consensus to remove these links, it might be better to sweep all the bio stubs at once rather than editors making separate requests for each one. --RL0919 (talk) 16:41, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Biography, fine. Country names: not always. Well-known long-established country names like United Kingdom, France, Italy, United States of America are OK to de-link. However, it's sometimes it's necessary to distinguish, say, Georgia from Georgia; Congo from Congo, or to explain recently-introduced country names such as South Sudan or Caribbean Netherlands. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:56, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Any necessary link or clarification of the country name will already be present in the article to which the stub template is attached. so it's superfluous to do it again. These links have already been removed from the related (non-protected) stub templates with no objections - some recently, some many months ago. Only these few protected stub templates remain to finish the job. Colonies Chris (talk) 23:41, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Not always it won't. A Prussian general wouldn't necessarily have the word Germany anywhere in his article. A Rhodesian politician wouldn't necessarily have the word Zimbabwe anywhere in her article. A Flemish painter wouldn't necessarily have the word Belgium anywhere in his article. Biography can be removed, sure, but with country names it's less clear-cut. As to there having been "no objections", there were, as I personally restored quite a few of the links to country names at the time. Grutness...wha? 01:34, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

If such clarifications would be of use to the reader, they should be in the article, not the stub template. Colonies Chris (talk) 16:49, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

"Should be" is not the same as "are", and when you're dealing with stubs you're always dealing with articles which are not as complete as they might be. For that reason, such information is more often than not missing. As such, having the link in the template is often of great importance. Grutness...wha? 23:32, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Beg pardon Chris, but there were objections: some on this page, some at WT:STUB, and some on your own talk page. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:50, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

I initially raised the whole question myself at WT:STUB here back in October 2010, before even starting on this, and only Grutness objected. He then took it to WT:WSS here, where there were two very specific objections, not to the general principle but to specific cases. I made a similar protected unlinking request to Song-stub here; the admin handling it took it to WT:WSS and there were no objections. A few people raised the question on my talk page, and I pointed out that it had already been raised at the two principal forums for stub-related matters, and nobody there had any problem with what I was doing. They did not take it any further. Since then I've been delinking common and duplicated terms from stub templates, and there have, as I said, been no objections. The only ones remaining to do of the bio-stubs are these last few protected ones. Colonies Chris (talk) 16:49, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

So what you're saying is that the "no objections" you mentioned above was only a few objections? And that the one case where there really were no objections was to {{song-stub}} which didn't have any country links anyway? That's pretty unconvincing... Grutness...wha? 23:32, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Deserves some kind of award really. Post (by proxy on one occasion) once or twice on obscure talkboards, and no one responds - and, hence, of course equally no one comes in to say "yes please, definitely go ahead and do that" - and this becomes "no one objected". Then, when several people do come to your talk page to complain once you start this obsessive de-linking, these opinions can supposedly be discounted because no one had complained at the point when you chose to announce your plans and also because, having said their piece, "they did not take it any further" as if this was some kind of war of attrition rather than a simple exchange of opinion with an intelligent adult who, one would hope, would pause for thought occasionally when challenged. At the end of the day, you claim that you have consensus for what you are doing, even though, of those who have commented, about 6-1 were against or at least raised some concerns. It takes some kind of genius to rationalise all that in quite that way. Is there not some other forum where this kind of behaviour can be looked at? WP:ANI perhaps? N-HH talk/edits 00:07, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Keep it cool, N-HH. I don't think there's any need for that. RL0919 - I notice that the example you gave as a request for de-linking was also by Colonies Chris. Was he responsible for the other requests as well? So far he seems to be the only person who would favour the delinking of countries, at least as far as the arguments here are concerned and - judging by the other comments - as far as the other times it has been raised are concerned as well. I certainly don't think that it would an acceptable thing as far as WP:WSS is concerned (though I could be wrong about that). Grutness...wha? 08:46, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Before even starting this process, that was going to affect a large number of stub templates, I posted my intention on the main talk page of the stub project (WT:STUB) and awaited comments - there was only one, from Grutness, and his request for discussion there and on WT:WSS did not receive any further support. N-HH may consider that the stub project talk page, and the main talk page of the stub sorting project WT:WSS are 'obscure talk boards'. Where else does he suggest I should have raised the question? That's where admin MSGJ went to ask for comments before accepting my request to delink song-stub. Does N-HH think I should have asked his permission personally? If he wants to take me to ANI, I'm prepared to vigorously defend my actions.

Moving on from these bad-tempered personal attacks, what are the objections to unlinking country names in stub templates? That they might carry some information that isn't in the articles to which they're attached? Then instead of just slapping on a stub template, using information which you know yourself but that isn't in the article (such as the Prussia/Germany association), take a few seconds to add it to the article. (Or if there are many Prussia-related stubs, create a Prussia-bio-stub template). That would be a much more useful activity than wasting time arguing here. In any case, the six unlink requests that prompted this discussion were to bio-stub, India-bio-stub, Ireland-bio-stub, Turkey-bio-stub, Croatia-bio-stub, Islam-bio-stub. Of these, two have no country link, and only one refers to a lesser-known country - the other three should automatically be unlinked in acordance with WP:OVERLINK anyway. So this all comes down to an argument about whether there are any Croatia-related stub articles that don't already link Croatia. Colonies Chris (talk) 10:05, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Um...you do know how stub sorting works, don't you? Largely through AWB? So that massive loads of articles can be done in one go without having to edit any text manually? And deliberately - with very few exceptions - only using current country-specific tabs to stop a profusion of over templating of articles? Perhaps you'd prefer it if all stub sorters abandoned using such techniques so that they could manually alter text as they went, thereby getting though about 1% of the work, and adding as many templates as is necessary top cover all past and present countries - a dozen or more for some people living in central Europe during the 20th century. As for the "obscure talk pages", it seems quite clear to me that the pages being referred to were the rarely-patrolled template talk pages (to which - it seems - you can also add the rarely patrolled WT:Stub) and it was only later that one stub type - one which had no nationality linking - was brought here that it garnered any comments at all. Once any dealing with nationality were brought up for conversation here (i.e., in this current conversation), the reasons why it is a bad idea started to be voiced from people who actually work in the stub-sorting field. The fact that there is fairly strenuous opposition if this discussion is anything to go by, and with reason well-enough explained already (I advise you to reread the earlier comments since judging by your question as to what the reasons are, you haven't done so), with only your one lone voice indicating that they should be delinked, it seems clear that the whole idea to delink nationalities in stub templates should be abandoned. For thew examples you give, it is very very likely that there will be articles relating to people from the princely states, ancient Connacht, ancient Anatolia, and Istria which do not have India, Ireland, Turkey, or Croatia in the articles. As with all other countries, these should be linked in the stub templates. Grutness...wha? 11:38, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

OK, let's look at a (theoretical) stub article about a person connected with ancient Connacht. A stub-sorter encounters it. He knows, from his own reading, that ancient Connacht is part of modern-day Ireland (even though the article doesn't explicitly say that), so he tags it with Ireland-bio-stub. The hope and intention behind tagging it is that someone else, with expert knowledge in the field, will come along someday and expand the article. Yes? Now, how will this expert who wants to use his expertise find an article that would benefit from it? It won't be by looking through everything that links to 'Ireland' - that's far too large and varied a set of articles to be useful for this purpose, and even if this expert finds, in that long list, an article that appears to be about a subject where his expertise lies, he won't be easily able to tell whether it's a fully formed article or a stub he could usefully expand. The only way he can determine that is by looking through the sub-category Ireland-bio-stubs. So whether the stub template actually links to 'Ireland' is completely irrelevant. Nobody's going to make use of that link. (And any expert who's working on the article will already know that Connacht is part of Ireland, so that link is no use to him whle he's there). Colonies Chris (talk) 12:14, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

As I said, you don't seem to have much knowledge of how AWB is used in stub-sorting, and how stopping at every article in a batch run to change the text enormously slows down the process. You also don't seem to realise that articles aren't only read by experts, but also by readers. Linking to Ireland makes perfect sense in a stub template when Ireland may not be linked in text. Let's look at your theoretical example. A stub-sorter encounters it. He knows, from his own reading, that ancient Connacht is part of modern-day Ireland (even though the article doesn't explicitly say that), so he tags it with Ireland-bio-stub. Correct. This places it in a stub category for eitors to expand, and also adds a link that may not be there or casual readers. The hope and intention behind tagging it is that someone else, with expert knowledge in the field, will come along someday and expand the article. Yes? That's certainly one of the aims, but not the only one. Now, how will this expert who wants to use his expertise find an article that would benefit from it? He'll look in the stub category, of course. But a casual reader woudn't. A casual reader looking at an article may require a link to a more overarching article. So whether the stub template actually links to 'Ireland' is completely irrelevant. For expansion by an expert, yes. To assist readers, no. And the primary purpose of Wikipedia is to be used by readers. In any case, linking to the country name in a stub template is a good idea even when the country is also linked in the lede. This isn't "overlinking", but is analogous to linking in separate sections of an article, which is standard practice. Grutness...wha? 00:08, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

I have accepted your point that stub sorters don't want to spend time also changing the article. You appear to have accepted my point about the expert not gaining any benefit from the link to 'Ireland'. So now let's look at the casual reader. They certainly won't be using the link to Ireland as a way of reaching the article, for the same reasons the expert wouldn't. So the question comes down to whether the link to Ireland would be useful to them when they're reading it, having found it by some other means. Accepting the (somewhat unlikely) contention that a reader who has sought out this rather obscure and specialised article does not already know that Connacht is nowadays part of Ireland, is it likely that they would then use the link in the stub template to find out more? Is it not much more likely that the reader will click on a link (if provided) to 'Connacht' (which will of course contain an upward link to the wider concept of 'Ireland'), or will use the search box to get there if it hasn't been linked in the article? Remember, we're talking about a reader who is not so unsophisticated as to be unable to use the search box - how else would they have reached the article? Either way, the link in the template is valueless. You react as if I'm suggesting removing the fact; I'm just talking about removing the link, not the fact. Colonies Chris (talk) 08:26, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

They certainly won't be using the link to Ireland as a way of reaching the article, for the same reasons the expert wouldn't. I beg to differ. They would most certainly be using the link - to get to the article on Ireland. The expert would have no need to get to that article, and would be attempting to go the other way anyway, from Ireland to the article (which s/he'd do through the stub categories). The reader, however, would be going the other way, from the stub to the Ireland article, and the best way to do that would be through the link. And who said anything about "seeking out an obscure article"? You never heard of random links? In any case, this doesn't answer the other comment, that the link is not overlinking in any case, given that a stub template is regarded as separate from the main text and therefore akin to the idea of inkingin oth an article's lead and in later sections of an article - something which is standard practice.

Sigh. We've wasted far too much time on this. There are more important uses of our time on Wikipedia than arguing over links in stub templates. I am clearly not going to change our views on the subject, just as you are clearly not going to change mine. Please, accept the fact that since there has been quite some opposition to your ideas here this may be some indication that your suggestion that there is no opposition to your suggested change is wrong. A couple of senior members of WP:WSS, plus others not connected to the project, have voiced opposition. Yours, in comparison, appears to be a lone voice. I'll leave it at that, and ask User:RL0919 to take all this into consideration when considering any delinking. Grutness...wha? 01:30, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

I agree that in the great scheme of things, this is pretty small stuff. But since you are so insistent on retaining these links, I think we should clearly establish the rationale. I find your preceding response rather confusing. You write (quoting me)

"They certainly won't be using the link to Ireland as a way of reaching the article, for the same reasons the expert wouldn't. I beg to differ."

But in fact, you don't appear to be differing with me on that statement at all. We're agreed that it's very unlikely that anyone would reach the article through the link to Ireland. What's at issue is whether anyone already reading the article would find the link useful. I suggested that a reader would be much more likely to navigate to the more immediate and less familiar concept of 'Connacht', and that therefore the link to a much wider and more familiar concept like 'Ireland' was superfluous, but you didn't respond. Colonies Chris (talk) 08:52, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

This is dragging on. The central issue seems to be on the interpretation of WP:OVERLINK. The talk page for that (Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (linking)) concerns amendments to that page, not interpretations of it: so, since it's largely a policy matter, I have requested assistance at WP:VPP#Overlinking in templates. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:08, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

I saw the note at the Village Pump, and I think that fewer (but not zero) links in stub templates is generally a good idea. It should be sufficient to link to the most important or unusual one (or perhaps two) words. [ip address redacted] User:Fred Bauder Talk 19:39, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Thank you for widening the discussion - it's always useful to get a wider view. The spirit of our linking guidelines is that we should link items likely to deepen a reader's understanding, and not dilute the value of those links by reflexively linking anything that's distantly relevant. I don't see any reason for the fact the a link is in a stub template to give it some sort of privileged status. No-one advocating retaining these links has been able to come up with a clear example of them providing significant benefit - in fact Grutness's response was to divert attention from the lack of an example by attempting to patronise me. I may be a lone voice, but I'm asking a sensible question and not getting a good answer. Colonies Chris (talk) 08:26, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Also coming from the Village Pump. I see no overlinking problem, stub templates are small work templates and links in them should be used as a function of its utility to stub sorting and article expansion. Utility for readers is of marginal importance, as they are not 'article text' (except noting that the article is known to be incomplete) and as such there is no problem in a eventual link duplication. As to the actual links. A link to [[biography]] looks clearly unnecessary as any potential editor knows what a biography is. Though I wouldn't mind keeping it for consistency, as most (all?) stub templates link to their subjects for reference. Alternatively linking to [[Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons]] could be interesting, even if many of them are not BLPs the extra warning could be welcome. Linking to the country seems to be useful for checking the correctness of the stub sorting. - Nabla (talk) 11:19, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
- Nabla, one possibility might be replacing the biography link with one to Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography or even Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies) - though I suppose they would be out on the grounds of self-reference... Grutness...wha? 11:31, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
  - Sounds fine! (I like the WikiProject most, but all 3 suggestions - mine included... - sound much better) Self-reference probably not a problem because work templates often naturally have it; already including stub templates, as (almost?) all point to Wikipedia:Stub. - Nabla (talk) 01:18, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
- Nabla, you say 'Linking to the country seems to be useful for checking the correctness of the stub sorting'. I presume you mean in a case where the article's been assigned the wrong country stub. Could you explain how the country link would help this? To use the hypothetical example we've been discussing above, if a Connacht-related bio article has been wrongly templated as e.g. a Croatia-bio-stub, surely the correctness is best checked by navigating to 'Connacht', and discovering there that it's in Ireland, rather than navigating to 'Croatia' and searching it for 'Connacht'? Colonies Chris (talk) 13:36, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
My takeaway from the discussion so far is that there doesn't seem to be much objection to removing the link from the word 'biography', but there is not currently consensus for removing the other links in these templates. So for now I'm going to partially fulfill the edit requests by just unlinking 'biography'. Please continue your discussions about the other links, and if it produces a consensus that requires further edits to protected templates, just put in a fresh edit request. Thanks. --RL0919 (talk) 18:11, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Use AWB to gradually reduce the use of moved stub tags?

Feel free to discuss this at Wikipedia talk:Stub types for deletion#Use AWB to gradually reduce the use of moved stub tags?. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 11:08, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Question regarding more specific stubs versus main notability

I noticed that {{BritishColumbia-politician-stub}} had been replaced by {{BritishColumbia-mayor-stub}} for Robert Dickinson (British Columbia politician) and William James Armstrong as the result of stub sorting. Both of those individuals are mayors but they are also Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) of British Columbia, provincial level politicians.

How to mark an article as a stub 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". One might argue that there is more notability associated with being an MLA compared to being a mayor, and, therefore, with {{BritishColumbia-politician-stub}} compared to the more specific {{BritishColumbia-mayor-stub}} since all MLAs are politicians but all are not necessarily mayors. So, is using a more specific stub appropriate in such cases? --Big_iron (talk) 09:15, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm not the one who was sorting these stubs, so I can only speak generally, but stub sorters often sort stubs according to the categories they are in. The nature of categorisation and stub sorting are both far from perfect, especially when it comes to main notability - a biography may be sorted in one way due to the categories it is in although the particular category is only a minor part of the person's notability. In my opinion, think about what stub sorting is most useful for: helping editors find similar articles to expand and de-stub. Is the article you mention better in Category:British Columbia politician stubs (bigger so less easy to find) or Category:British Columbia mayor stubs (smaller, easier to find, but not the main notability)? You can always revert and put it back into the previous category if you think it fits better. Severo^TC 09:39, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

I think an important thing here is the interpretation of the word "those" in it is strongly recommended that only those relating to the subject's main notability be used. To me (and I'm sure to many other stub-sorters) it suggests more than one is possible if there's notability in more than one area. There's no reason why the articles you mention can't have both the mayor and politician stubs. Chances are, as Severo says, whoever sorted the articles was guided primarily by the permanent categories (a lot of stub sorting is done that way), and if an article is in a fairly general category (e.g., politicians) and a more specific one (e.g., mayors), it's quite common to use the stub type relating to the more specific category. It's not perfect, and there will be stuff-ups, but the good thing about stub sorting (and Wikipedia in general) is that if a more knowledgeable editor (in this case, like you!) notices a mistake, then there's nothing to stop them fixing it :) Grutness...wha? 13:35, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

Israeli artists

There are now about 40 articles that are tagged with Template:Israel-artist-stub. Is that enough to justify their own stub category, Israeli artist stubs? (At the moment the stub template lumps them into the broader category artist-stubs). Colonies Chris (talk) 10:53, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

No, not yet - unless there's a specific Wikipedia:WikiProject Israeli art. The thresholds are pretty clearly explained both at WP:Stub and at the top of WP:WSS/P - 60 stubs unless it's the primary stub for a specific WikiProject, in which case it's 30. We've got tons of templates with 40 or more stubs that are still upmerged (if you want the explanation for why, check WP:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub rationales). Hopefully they're currently in both Category:Artist stubs and Category:Israeli people stubs, BTW. Grutness...wha? 13:07, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

49 transclusions - plus there's nothing stopping you from writing 11 stub articles on notable artists and then a category would be viable! Severo^TC 07:21, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Plus I've just notices that there's a {{Israel-painter-stub}} with about a dozen articles which would be upmerged in there... I've proposed the category :) Grutness...wha? 10:18, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

3.7 Monthly Newspaper Topic Request

99.194.217.121 (talk) 02:49, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

Huh? Grutness...wha? 09:11, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

New report idea

Please discuss the feasibility of this idea:

It would be *nice* (although, potentially difficult) to have a periodic list of all templates that pass the following criteria:

template name ends in '-stub'
template is transcluded on at least 60 articles
template is *not* found on the newstub= field of any...
- {{stub category}}
- {{regional stub category}}
- {{parent-only stub category}}

This report would list templates that are ripe for splitting into categories of their own. Dawynn (talk) 18:15, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Mmmm. Yeah, that would point out a lot of viable new categories... Grutness...wha? 02:09, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Hum .. I can't precisely manage that, but can run a very similar query: "Titles ending in '-stub' that are not linked to from any category page that transcludes {{stub category}}, {{regional stub category}} or {{parent-only stub category}}". Report is posted at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Uncatted stubs. - TB (talk) 18:51, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, this is useful - but the result gives a lot of redirects: is there any way to fold these into where they redirect? Severo^TC 20:01, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

"Templates that are not redirects and that have titles ending in '-stub' that are not linked to from any category page that transcludes {{stub category}}, {{regional stub category}} or {{parent-only stub category}}". List updated - 287 entries on it now compared to the 591 before. - TB (talk) 16:36, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Getting better but it's still tripping over template redirects a bit - now I notice that if a template redirect is linked on {{Stub category}} (let's say {{Euro-foo-stub}} instead of the template {{Europe-foo-stub}}), it brings up the template anyway. I wish I could be more helpful but I have zero experience working with the database dumps. Severo^TC 17:03, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

So .. a categeory linking to a redirect to a template is sufficient to exclude that template from the report ? That's doable. Watch this space. - TB (talk) 17:22, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

I think that's right: basically I think what we're interested in here is how many times {{Europe-foo-stub}} is transcluded in total (directly or through redirects), because the existence of {{Euro-foo-stub}} doesn't really matter too much. Severo^TC 17:53, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

(A list of template redirects linked from category pages would also be useful I guess, as one place we do want to update their usage (i.e bypass the redirect) is on the category page which gives editors advice on how to use the templates. Severo^TC 17:57, 11 September 2011 (UTC))

Okay, updated. Elimiating templates linked to from category pages via redirects reduced the list from 287 to 187, but counting transclusions viua redirects towards the 60 limit increased this again to 219. I'll look into listing categories making use of the three named templates above linking to stub templates via redirects in a separate list. - TB (talk) 18:04, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

The list of categories advising to link to a redirect rather than directly to a stub template is up at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stubs catted via redirects. Enjoy. - TB (talk) 18:48, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Would anyone have any objections if I were to bypass the redirects on the category pages, so that the links provided as guidance to editors were of the template, not the redirect (and match what is listed at the top of the category listing)? Severo^TC 16:27, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Cool! I ask for one report, afraid that it would be too cumbersome to build -- and I get two reports! Great work. Can we make these run on a regular basis? (No more than weekly, no less than once a month, please) Dawynn (talk) 15:31, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Rebuilding instructions for both reports are posted at the bottom of each. Anyone with toolserver access should be able to run them as needed - it's a five minute job. I'll keep this page on my watchlist, or you can of course post on my talk page to request a refresh. - TB (talk) 15:52, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Problem. Not sure how Wikipedia does everything behind the scenes, but it seems to sometimes credit articles tagged to redirects to both the redirect and the true template. Which means that a simple add function will produce an inflated count. Not sure how to work around that, but feel free to review {{oceania-hotel-stub}} as an example. Dawynn (talk) 18:46, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Checking the database directly (as the report does), I see that {{Oceania-hotel-stub}} has 33 transclusions and {{Oceania-hotel-struct-stub}} 32 right now. The report lists 65 total, which agrees with this. Pages that link to "Template:Oceania-hotel-stub" shows both tranclusions ({{ }}) and links ([[ ]]), listing 77 in total. Counting by hand I see the same number of translusions (33 and 32) and an additional 8 and 4 links. 33 + 32 + 8 + 4 = 77. - TB (talk) 19:39, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Take a moment to look closer. Going back to Pages that link to "Template:Oceania-hotel-stub", you see something like this:

Menen Hotel
Vaiaku Lagi Hotel
OD-N-Aiwo Hotel

. . .

Template:Oceania-hotel-struct-stub
- Menen Hotel
- Vaiaku Lagi Hotel
- OD-N-Aiwo Hotel

Again, I don't know why, say, the Menen Hotel is listed as being tagged by both templates when its truly only tagged by the redirect, but that's the way it is. There is only one Menen Hotel article, not two. It shouldn't be counted twice. I'm not sure how "Jarry" counts transclusions, but the "Transclusion count" link gives an accurate count of the true transclusions (33). Dawynn (talk) 00:44, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Ah - I see your point now. Short answer is Mediawiki is weird about counting links, I just go with that weirdness. Ultimately it's a flaw in the MediaWiki software on which Wikipedia runs - see bug #12019; the semantics of one of the underlying database table have been muddled by a bit of lazy development. Nobody has (yet) been brave enough to fix this.

For your example, both 33 and 65 are estimates, although in this case the 33 is a rather good one ;) - TB (talk) 06:52, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

I have made a number of changes, based on these reports. I'd like to see them run again, when you have a chance. (Even if the count issue is not fixed) Dawynn (talk) 12:44, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Lists

Remind me: can a list be a stub, or not? An editor/bot has recently tagged a whole lot of lists as stubs: I had thought that a list could not be a stub, but can't find chapter and verse to support this and am suddenly wondering. PamD 14:38, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

From Wikipedia:Stub, "Similarly, stub status usually depends on the length of prose text alone – lists, templates, images, and other such peripheral parts of an article are usually not considered when judging whether an article is a stub." That being the case, list articles would all be stubs. In order to avoid this, I think we've generally agreed that lists are not stubs.

I also base my conclusion on the fact that "List" and "Stub" are two distinct grades in Wikipedia:Assessment. And there is no "Stub list" class. So, again, lists and stubs are two separate things. Dawynn (talk) 16:08, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

VIPUL PRATAP SINGH

File:Example.jpgVipul Pratap Singh was born in 24 May 1984 and is the elder child of smt.Vijay Laxmi and Shri.R.B.Atal(doctor). She spent her early childhood at the Lucknow

Career He had completed bachelor in pharmacy from "UPTU" Uttar pradesh jhansi.after completion of cource completed Pharma management and administration degree After completed research training in clinical trail where they learn the clinical pathological remedies.now day he is working in ORGANIC INDIA as executive scientist --223.189.100.138 (talk) 18:29, 17 September 2011 (UTC)www.vipulhealthclub.spruz.com

This page is not a forum to suggest the creation of articles. If you wish to create an article on any subject, go to Wikipedia:Articles for creation and follow the instructions there. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:24, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

Stubs don't work

The Europe rail transport stub does not work. Neither "Europe-rail-stub" or "Europe-rail-transport-stub" as given in the stub article work; I tried to use both for ASVi museum. Hugo999 (talk) 22:27, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Seems OK now. PamD 22:42, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Scotland-Olympic-medalist-stub

Not too familiar with stub creation process so I wonder if someone could kindly add {{Scotland-Olympic-medalist-stub}} to your discovery page. Created by Mais oui! (talk · contribs) without recourse to Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals, it needs careful consideration as Scotland is not an Olympic nation. Tim! (talk) 07:18, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Timothy Elie Girard

United States Army, SFC Retired — Preceding unsigned comment added by Girard01 (talk • contribs) 20:20, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Stub template list?

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub type sizes provides a monthly list of all stub categories. Where could one find a list of all stub templates? 216.188.204.25 (talk) 12:42, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

At WP:STUBS. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:51, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

No. That's a manually updated resource. In fact, that's part of *why* I'm looking for a full list -- so we can look at updating this resource. 216.188.204.25 (talk) 14:59, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

WT:STUBS is the official list. A number of stub templates which do exist were created out of process, i.e. they were not proposed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals, or they were proposed there but not subsequently approved. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:12, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Or, as often happens, they were approved, and created, but the creator never took the time to list them. The same problem happens with the categories. Some get created without going through the proper channels, some get created with all proper authority. But the approval status of the categories has no bearing on whether they've been added to the list. Some that have not been properly approved are on the list, some that have been approved are not on the list -- again because this is a manual process and depends on creators to actually list their creations. 216.188.204.25 (talk) 16:54, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Nevermind. Found what I was looking for: Category:Stub message boxes. 216.188.204.25 (talk) 16:57, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Timothy Elie Girard

United States Army, SFC Retired — Preceding unsigned comment added by Girard01 (talk • contribs) 20:20, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Stub template list?

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub type sizes provides a monthly list of all stub categories. Where could one find a list of all stub templates? 216.188.204.25 (talk) 12:42, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

At WP:STUBS. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:51, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

No. That's a manually updated resource. In fact, that's part of *why* I'm looking for a full list -- so we can look at updating this resource. 216.188.204.25 (talk) 14:59, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

WT:STUBS is the official list. A number of stub templates which do exist were created out of process, i.e. they were not proposed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals, or they were proposed there but not subsequently approved. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:12, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Or, as often happens, they were approved, and created, but the creator never took the time to list them. The same problem happens with the categories. Some get created without going through the proper channels, some get created with all proper authority. But the approval status of the categories has no bearing on whether they've been added to the list. Some that have not been properly approved are on the list, some that have been approved are not on the list -- again because this is a manual process and depends on creators to actually list their creations. 216.188.204.25 (talk) 16:54, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Nevermind. Found what I was looking for: Category:Stub message boxes. 216.188.204.25 (talk) 16:57, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Italian musicians

We have {{Italy-music-bio-stub}}, which categorises into both Category:Italian people stubs and Category:Music biography stubs; and we have {{Italy-musician-stub}}, which categorises into Category:Italian musician stubs. Is there some subtle distinction that should be noted on the relevant cat pages? --Redrose64 (talk) 18:16, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

I would guess that a musician would be someone known for ability to play an instrument. (I have seen that, historically, the voice is considered an instrument for WPSS -- so singers are musicians) Anything else related to music would be music-bio. A record producer, or someone known for composing music, but not necessarily for playing would qualify as music-bio. 216.188.204.25 (talk) 15:21, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

I've tried to straighten up the European music categories. The main category was correct, and the nationals should follow. For Italy it should look something like this:

Category:Italian music biography stubs / {{Italy-music-bio-stub}} (23 P)
- Category:Italian composer stubs / {{Italy-composer-stub}}
- Category:Italian musician stubs / {{Italy-musician-stub}}
- {{Italy-conductor-stub}} (upmerge) (39 P)

Just need a proposal for the new parent category. Should be speediable with the two full categories, and two half-full templates. 216.188.204.25 (talk) 17:49, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

Non-approved stub: Nuclide-stub

See template:Nuclide-stub. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:01, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Taken to WP:SFD. Severo^TC 13:13, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

Size of stub categories

Hi! Can someone tell me whether there is a minimum size for stub categories below which {{popstub}} is added? I always thought it was 30, but I can't find the relevant page. The template was recently added to Category:Systemic hormonal preparation stubs (after I had removed it) which has 48 entries. I think it's unlikely that more than a couple of additional articles will turn up in the near future. Thanks --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 10:11, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

"Threshold" is usually 60. Categories with less than 50 can expect {{popstub}} to be added. Cateories with 50-59 are in the danger zone - not usually deleted, but rarely approved for creation. If a category is unlikely to grow beyond 50, it should probably be deleted and the template upmerged to the next category higher. Severo^TC 10:51, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, perhaps I can find a few more. It would a pity to delete it, since it's part of a series of ATC code based categories in WP:PHARM. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 11:36, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

It would also get lost in Category:Pharmacology stubs - perhaps, judging by permcats, an Category:Endocrinology stubs or similar would be useful and a better home for it? (My knowledge in this area is only based upon the permcats though :) ) Severo^TC 11:43, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Hm. That would break the (useful, in my opinion) distinction between pharmaceutical stubs (WP:PHARM, Category:Pharmacology stubs descendants) and medical ones (WP:MED, Category:Medicine stubs descendants). Will look for some more stubs fitting in that category when I have time. --ἀνυπόδητος (talk) 17:08, 1 January 2012 (UTC)

Norwegian politician template ambiguity.

Please see this discussion. Its an August discussion that needs clarification of a typo before closing the discussion. Dawynn (talk) 18:51, 2 January 2012 (UTC)

Category:Stubs cleared

The stub category has been full of entries for a good month, not least since a particular editor had a blitz of creating stubs (consisting largely of a scatter of google hits) in early December. But the category is now empty - User:KConWiki did a blitz overnight and I finished it off just now. It won't stay empty for long but will be less dispiriting now that we've sorted all of that batch of well-intended trash. PamD 10:12, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

Administrative help!

We could really use an administrator to come help clear the Deletion log. We have requests dating back to November that need a final decision and processing. Dawynn (talk) 15:09, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Help with Category:Stub message boxes needing attention

Could someone please review the logic behind Category:Stub message boxes needing attention? There are several templates marked as either containing Non-existent categories, or Category names that don't end with Stubs. These seem to be misflagged, as the templates do not reflect either of these issues. (The Broken image tags all seem correct, and I've been correcting those) Dawynn (talk) 11:55, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

I did some spot checking and found these issues were occurring on recently created/changed templates (from which I would infer job queue issues). Have you found any where the issue is long standing? Severo^TC 13:14, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

The Ns I don't know the cause, but I've fixed them by carrying out a WP:NULLEDIT, having found that WP:PURGE didn't work.

I've found that one of the Ss is caused by a mysterious non-displaying character appearing somewhere adjacent to, or within, the word stubs which causes one extra character to be counted, so that the technique

remove the last six characters from the category
add back on a single space and the word "stubs"
is the category unchanged?

detects that the two categories are not identical, so it assumes that the original didn't end in " stubs".

To fix this, I am presently re-entering the cats, like this. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:14, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Done, see here. Only three left: one B and two genuine Ss. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:35, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

That B has now been fixed. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:12, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Question about a specific stub

Hey, I recently came across the Libya-judo-bio-stub, and I was wondering why it even exists? It is only on one page, and from what I can tell, that isn't going to change any time soon. Putting the under the Libya-sport-bio-stub category would seem to make more sense, seeing as there are only twenty in that stub category it isn't overly large. I was just wondering if there was another reason for it to exist. Thanks in advance! Jeancey (talk) 20:41, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Why would {{Libya-sport-bio-stub}} be better? Why not {{Africa-judo-bio-stub}} instead? The person fits both, after all. The template {{Libya-judo-bio-stub}} covers the intersection of those, and I imagine that it was created for that very reason - to avoid the need to put both {{Africa-judo-bio-stub}} and {{Libya-sport-bio-stub}} onto articles. Although there is only one current use, the template was created in 2008, when there may have been many more than one candidate for its use. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:32, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Ok, I was just wondering. I had no idea what the process was for these things, so I thought I would ask. Thanks for clearing it up! Jeancey (talk) 21:34, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Taiwan stubs

While I understand that ROC-related stubs are most likely going to be taken care of by Taiwan-based editors or editors interested in Taiwan-related topics, it is going to be problematic to have 'Taiwan' shown in articles unrelated to Taiwan, and it possibly violates existing NPOV policies which stipulate that 'Republic of China' should be used for anything related to the ROC yet unrelated to Taiwan. These include geo-stubs and road-stubs related to locations on Kinmen, Matsu, Wuchiu, Pratas, bio-stubs related to ROC generals and marshals who have never set foot on Taiwan, university-stubs for universities that were not re-established in Taiwan after 1949, and so on and so forth. Should this be solved by having a separate set of ROC-something-stub templates, or by adding an option in the Taiwan-something stub templates so that 'Republic of China' instead of 'Taiwan' will be shown in the tagged articles? 203.98.184.99 (talk) 16:10, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm not an expert in Taiwan, RoC and pre-1949 issues. However, I don't see an issue in template names. The wording of the text in the template can be altered to be desirable and the categories don't need to have identical names either. Severo^TC 13:16, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Should an option be added within the existing Taiwan stub templates? Or should another set of templates be created? I agree that they can be fed into the same categories. 59.188.42.121 (talk) 16:38, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

This IP user can be ignored. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

Spacing betwen stub tags

From the look of Tree planting bar, either {{forestry-stub}} or {{tool-stub}} has something the matter with their spacing - there's a gap between the two as displayed. Someone might like to take a look and fix one of them? Thanks. PamD 14:04, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Fixed, see here. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:14, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks - Tree planting bar looks much tidier now! PamD 23:19, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

WP Stub Sorting in the Signpost

The WikiProject Report would like to focus on WikiProject Stub Sorting for a Signpost article. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, here are the questions for the interview. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. Multiple editors will have an opportunity to respond to the interview questions. If you know anyone else who would like to participate in the interview, please share this with them. Have a great day. -Mabeenot (talk) 23:40, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

England Test Crickter Stubs

Typing {{England-Test-cricket-bio-stub}} produces a Category called "England Test Crickter stubs", which is apparently on 141 different articles. Whether we need such a category (no other cricketing nation has such a stub category) is one point; more obviously, we should spell "cricketer" correctly. When I tried to make this do that, it spat it back at me, so I've brought it here. Johnlp (talk) 08:49, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

The scope of the category is well within stub sorting norms. The name of the category is obviously wrong! So, as renaming categories is an administrative function, I've posted it at Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion (for renaming, not deletion). Severo^TC 08:58, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Johnlp (talk) 09:09, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Stub Type Sizes page code

Could someone please look into how this page is generated? I noticed, even on the first day it was posted, several of the page counts seemed to be way off (more significantly than would occur through normal editing). In fact, the first two categories listed have negative article counts. Dawynn (talk) 12:27, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Have you contacted the bot operator? --Redrose64 (talk) 14:54, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Template:Parent-only stub category missing parameters

Please add the "category type" and "WikiProject" parameters to template {{Parent-only stub category}} to bring it in line with the main {{Stub category}} template. Dawynn (talk) 23:02, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

Done, see here and here. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:28, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Template:Illinois-geo-stub

{{Illinois-geo-stub}} seems unseemly large. The current picture (changed in June 2011 to the current one) leaves a huge amount of whitespace.

See this triple instance:

This Illinois state location article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

76.65.128.198 (talk) 11:52, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

I have removed it. images are not actually needed and they do clutter the place up if there are too many stub messages. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 05:00, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Three different stubs produce the same stub category

All articles tagged with the folliowing 3 stubs end up in the same (too large) stub category:

Template:Washington-bio-stub
Template:Washington-stub
Template:Washington-newspaper-stub

Just wondering why that is. Thanks in advance Ottawahitech (talk) 23:43, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

195 pages is not overlarge. These are what we call "upmerged categories": at the time that the stub templates were created, it was felt that the 60-article minimum could not yet be achieved. If you can now identify 60 or so articles in this category which are biographical, or 60+ which relate to newspapers, then we can create a sub-category. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals#"Speedy creation" item S1. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:40, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your quick response. I guess what I am looking for is how to find articless that I might be able to contribute to. For example, if I had knowledge about living people who live in Washington State, but was presented with a list of 195 articles that included a whole bunch of sports events and other topics that I know nothing about, as is the case in the stub category I was asking about I would not find navigating the stub categories an efficient way to find articles to contribute to.

Sorry for the long-winded way of describing what I am getting at. Did I make myself clear? Ottawahitech (talk) 17:41, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

You could use the WhatLinksHere feature - Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Washington-bio-stub - this will tell you all the articles that include {{Washington-bio-stub}}. In this case, there aren't that many (14) which is why we don't have a separate category. (Possibly there aren't that many because all articles are already large enough not to be stubs, or possible because not all articles have been tagged). Severo^TC 19:03, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Also, you could try CatScan eg [1] - although this search may need some refining. Severo^TC 19:25, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. I will have to try those two types of links for a few days, to see if it helps me narrow down areas that I may be able to contribute to. btw as far as using the Tool at [2] I see two problems:

It takes too long to get results
It is quite complicated to set up to get the exact results one is looking for imo. Ottawahitech (talk) 20:48, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't think we have ever created a category about living people who live in a particular area. That's too high maintenance. Even the non-stub categories don't keep track of where living people are residing. But, based on this conversation, I started to fill out the {{Washington-bio-stub}}, and found that the topic was greatly undersorted. There is now a Category:Washington (state) people stubs. I based my tagging on people born in the state of Washington. There is also a sub-category about Washington politicians, which I'm sure is based more on whether the politician represented the state of Washington, regardless of where the person was born. Dawynn (talk) 10:40, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Stub size clarification

I'm trying to find the source of the scope guideline of 60 articles for a stub. I realize the number has to be set somewhere, but how was 60 met, and are there exceptions? For example, Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting lists Category:Virginia geography stubs in Category:Overpopulated stub categories. Virginia has 95 counties and 40 independent cities that are essentially the same as counties, thus there could be 135 stubs. Only 17 have over the 50-page deletion guideline. That leaves 118 potential categories that are instead merged into the parent category of Virginia geography stubs. Say each of those stubs has only 10 associated articles, that would mean 1,180 pages going into Category:Virginia geography stubs. Another example of a category desperately in need of subcats is Category:United States history stubs with 623 pages, plus subcategories for US history books, US military history, and Old West. That category has everything from colonial settlements to Cold War tactics. My interest is in working on those stubs pertaining to the American Founding. I don't recognize on sight every article that touches on that time period, and with 623 it's time-consuming to click every link.

WP:DIFFUSE does not give a limit to the size of categories, leaving only the guidance on the banner, "subcategories may be helpful for browsing." If we are ok with Virginia geography stubs having 800 plus articles, that's cool with me. Category:American films has over 24,000 pages, but it also has 21 subcategories to help navigation. Leaving 800 pages in Virginia geography stubs does not make it easy for someone who might want to expand related articles. Say an editor wants to expand articles related to {cl|Spotsylvania County, Virginia geography stubs}}, 39 page listings will get lost among 800.

One possibility is to break up the county stubs into categories for region, which is partially in place. Still Category:Northern Virginia geography stubs has only 106 pages, while Category:Southwest Virginia geography stubs has 294. Also, those counties in the regional categories Would an exception be advantageous to editors in cases where stub categories have high cumulative article count? When a stub category has a large and wide variety of pages, there needs to a better system of identifying what those stubs really are. Cheers. Encycloshave (talk) 19:14, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

60 articles isn't a maximum, it's a minimum used as a threshold to decide if a new stub cat would be warranted. Also please note that Category:Overpopulated stub categories isn't automatic, it just means that the category has a {{verylargestub}} template on it. These are added manually, as here. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:26, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Actually, I realize 60 is the minimum for creation, and 50 is a guideline for deletion. My question was regarding that minimum, how it was decided, and whether there can be an exception as way to make large categories more easily navigable. Cheers. Encycloshave (talk) 20:45, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Does it matter where the {{stub}} is placed?

There is discussion at Wikipedia_talk:HotCat#Hotcat_putting_cats_in_wrong_place_.28below_not_above_stub.29. PamD 23:36, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Category sort of stub categories

Stub categories were sorted under µ in [3] in 2005. µ was chosen at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Archive 6#Very unhappy with over promotion of stub-categories with the rationale: How about using µ, as in "micro-articles"? Quote from Micro: "More generally, the prefix means 'very small'. However, a change in the category software means that lower case letters in other alphabets are now displayed as upper case in category headings. The lower case Greek µ is displayed as the upper case Greek version Μ which looks like a Latin M. See for example Category:Sport in Serbia. The Greek Μ sorts after the Latin letters but it's confusing that it looks like the Latin letter, and the association with micro is lost. In fact the Latin M means mega- which signals the opposite of stubs. Here are some links showing the confusion with the Latin letter: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Archive 16#Categorization of stub categories, Template talk:Stub category#Sorting, Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Wayward letter heading on category page. I think the character should be changed to something still sorting after Latin letters but not looking like a Latin letter. I suggest Σ (sigma) because it carries the 'S' sound as in stub. Σ is used for summation in mathematics. It can be discussed whether this association is good or bad, but most people probably don't know that meaning anyway. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:23, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm not even sure about Σ because it could still confuse people (well, it would confuse me) who aren't familiar with how the sorting is handled. Although it would be an improvement, in principle I don't like hacky workarounds like this. How about using some special indicator like {{other}} which displays under a heading Other at the end of the items? I've no idea what the coding or processing implications might be, though.--A bit iffy (talk) 16:27, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Not sure what {{other}} has to do with this. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:47, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

To clarify my suggestion of {{other}}: I don't mean the existing "For other uses..." template, I mean just something else other than a letter i.e. some indicator other than a letter. Anyway, it seems that the software won't allow something like I suggest.--A bit iffy (talk) 17:36, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

The software only allows one character to be displayed. If it's a letter it has to be upper case. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:58, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

There is tradition for using Greek letters. Wikipedia:Categorization#Sort keys says:

To place entries after the main alphabetical list, use sort keys beginning with tilde ("~"). Other characters used for this purpose are "µ" (mu), used to place stub categories at the end of subcategory lists; "β" (beta) for Wikipedia books; "Ι" (iota) for images; "Ρ" (rho) for portals; "Τ" (tau) for templates; and "Ω" (omega) for WikiProjects.

The software change means that β is displayed as Β, for example in Category:History. Several of the mentioned Greek letters look like Latin letters, but it's less confusing when it's a logical letter like B for books, I for images, P for portals, T for templates. Using the Greek version of S for stubs makes sense to me in this context. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:24, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

I think this is a good idea! It has looked odd since the software change a few months back. Severo^TC 21:01, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

I think it's really confusing to have letters which look like Latin letters appearing "out of alphabetical order" at the end of the category (even if they are "logical" like B for books). I'd suggest using sort keys for stubs/portals/templates which don't end up looking like Latin letters, e.g. Σ (sigma), "Ω" (omega), etc. Alternately, could we get "the software" changed so it works the way it used to (was it even an intentional change in the first place?) DH85868993 (talk) 13:12, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it was an intentional change, which occurred late February/early March 2011, soon after (but not part of) the MediaWiki 1.17 deployment. The primary intention was to make category sorting case-insensitive, so that kludges like {{DEFAULTSORT:Liberty Head Nickel}} (as seen on Liberty Head nickel) would not be required. An effect of this was that sortkeys beginning "a", "b" and "c" would now sort with "A", "B" and "C" instead of after "X", "Y" and "Z" as previous. This means that 26 letter headings are now needed for Latin letters, instead of 52. Greek letters always sorted after Latin, and suffered from the same problem: "α", "β" and "γ" sorted after "Χ" "Ψ" "Ω", but now sort with "Α" "Β" "Γ". The databases took several days to rebuild, which is why the initial problems described at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 87#categorically random categories appeared. It was known at the time that its effects would be irreversible, so no, it's not going to be changed back. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:56, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. Given that's the situation then I support PrimeHunter's suggestion of using Σ as the sort key for stub categories. DH85868993 (talk) 01:04, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

I'd agree that Σ would be much less confusing than the Μ which looks so like M. PamD 13:10, 11 February 2012 (UTC)

None of all th1s would be an issue if we stick the stub categories in the related WikiProject category. I have suggested this on a couple of occasions in the past without success. Having stubs categories in content categories is "odd". I know that it is done to promote the expansion of stub articles but do we know whether that aim is achieved? And since the WikiProject categories and template categories are not in content categories, why are the stub categories mixed in with content? I know the answer to that question: it is because that is how it has always been done. I think the WikiProject and template categories were created after the category system was instigated whereas that stubs existed before then. One odd quirk of having stub cats in with content cats is that we can end up with a category have one subcat and the subcat is a stub category! I have only stuck this once however. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 04:22, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Template categories are sometimes included in content categories, e.g. Category:Motorsport templates is included in Category:Motorsport. DH85868993 (talk) 05:00, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Having template categories in content categories is not common. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 05:04, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Wikiproject banners are placed on talk pages, therefore their categories contain only talk pages. Stub templates are only used in article space, therefore stub categories will only contain article space pages. There is also no direct relationship between stub templates and WikiProjects: it has been stated before that stub templates do not belong to any WikiProject except WP:WSS. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:47, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

The WikiProject banners are a red herring in this discussion as is the fact that stubs are only used in article namespace. As for the claim that there is no direct relationship between stub templates and WikiProjects, that is not strictly true. Here are some examples:

Category:WikiProject Science and Category:Science stubs

Category:WikiProject Geography and Category:Geography stubs

Category:WikiProject New Zealand and Category:New Zealand stubs

Category:WikiProject Sports and Category:Sports stubs

Category:WikiProject Football and Category:Football stubs

These are examples that I tried without putting any effort into looking at the WikiProject and stub sorting category hierarchy. As you can see there is a direct relationship between the two. There would be stubs categories that do not have this direct relationship but but they can simply be assigned to the most appropriate WikiProject(s). It is high time that stub sorting and WikiProjects were intermeshed. I am certain that if this is done the ultimate aim of improving stubs will be incrementally approached. Finally, what has been stated before is not relevant. WP is forever changing and we have to make sure that all of the component parts of WP change to improve it for readers. Imagine how it would be if WP still had CamelCase? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 21:42, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

I have made the suggested change from µ to Σ.[4] PrimeHunter (talk) 01:40, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Food bio stubs with wrong formating or too-large images?

See this version of Jennifer McLagan for problem stub format for {{chef-bio-stub}}. Same effect from {{food-bio-stub}}. Haven't tried {{drink-bio-stub}}, the third of the batch listed at Category:Food and drink biography stubs, but I suspect it's the same. Could someone who knows about format of stub templates have a look at these? Thanks. PamD 09:59, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

I shrunk {{chef-bio-stub}} and {{drink-bio-stub}} a bit, the other one seemed okay. Was it just the picture size a problem? For future reference, you can change a stub pic size by changing the number in the 'pix' parameter. Stubs can also get extra whitespace around them which only appear on some pages, if they have extra blank lines in the template defn - that can be easy to miss when editing them. --Qetuth (talk) 14:20, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It's not a problem with any of those, but with the stub template above it (in the article) - for your example Jennifer McLagan that is {{Canada-writer-stub}}. This template had blank lines between the }} and the <noinclude> - it's not always appreciated that the <noinclude>...</noinclude> part is stripped after the template is transcluded - so those blank lines remain in place. It's a common problem which is easily fixed - see here. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:21, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, both of you. I'd experimented swapping order of the tags and they looked fine, so I assumed that the problem was with extra space before the chef tag. Should have experimented with further combinations of tags! Will try and remember the two fixes offered, anyway. The article looks fine now. PamD 14:37, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Doh! That's what I was trying to explain with the extra whitespace rambling - but it didn't occur to me to check the other stub. --Qetuth (talk) 22:37, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

About the absence of Spanish stubs

I'm new to Wikipedia. I'm interested in adding stub tags to pages in Spanish Wikipedia, and I haven't found the way to do it.

Then I found the following, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Stub, saying that "stubs are supposed to be recognized by the user" in Spanish pages without any notice.

I don't agree, and I'm interested in adding stub notices, probably with a differently worded template, to articles in Spanish.

--Tender prey (talk) 11:39, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

interwiki (es)

Please, ~~quit~~ remove the es:Plantilla:Esbozo interwiki. Thanks. ~~×α£đ ~~^es 16:14, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

es:Plantilla:Esbozo is not used anymore. In the Spanish Wikipedia stubs are supposed to be recognized by the user, and no additional message is required. Therefore, es:Plantilla:Esbozo is not a correct interwiki for en:Template:Stub. 200.111.44.186 (talk) 12:28, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Done X clamation point 04:40, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

{{editprotected}}

Not done I can still clearly see the link to the Spanish version! :| TelCo NaSp Ve :| 05:16, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Like most templates, the interwiki links are held in the /doc subpage which is not protected. Please make the change yourself. Thanks — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:54, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks... was too busy looking at Template:Stub documentation. :| TelCo NaSp Ve :| 19:12, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Each Wikipedia language can choose its own policies. The Spanish Wikipedia apparently decided in 2008 to not use stub templates. See es:Plantilla discusión:Esbozo#Borrar. If you want to change that then you must make a suggestion at the Spanish Wikipedia. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:54, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Stub category visibility

It has been suggested that stub categories should be hidden. Please comment at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2012 April 6#Category:Stub categories. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:14, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Closing stub proposals

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I couldn't find an answer in any of the usual places. What are the rules/conventions on closing stub sorting discussions? How long should you wait, for speedy and for non-speedy? Is it different for proposals vs deletions vs discoveries? Should you be an admin or some other role? Is closing your own nominations frowned on, encouraged following consensus, or neither? --Qetuth (talk) 22:58, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

This does seem to be something that the proposal page should address. I was wondering about the procedure myself. Step 5 5 days after listing it here, if there is general approval or no objection, go ahead and create the new category and/or template following the format on Wikipedia:Stub. List the new stub type on the stub types list in an appropriate section. If consensus is not clear, or discussion is still ongoing, the proposal will remain open until consensus can be reached. That last sentence provides little guidance where there is no comment at all. With regard to who does or should do the closing, comments at Wikipedia:Requested moves/Closing instructions#Who can close requested moves may be well advised. --Bejnar (talk) 01:50, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Template needed: {{Tunisia-school-stub}}

I've just stub-sorted Al-Sadiqiyyah High School and note that we have a lot of African school templates but not yet one for Tunisia. I was about to try and create one modelled on {{Libya-school-stub}} etc, but was reminded by the message there that "Please propose new stub templates and categories here before creation.", linking to Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals, which then talks only about proposing new stub categories. So I'm not clear what the procedure is for proposing a new stub template in an existing pattern of such templates. Advice, please! PamD 17:00, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

It's for both: it says "This page only deals with stub TEMPLATES and CATEGORIES" also "If you wish to propose a new stub category and template, please follow these procedures" --Redrose64 (talk) 17:57, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

It's not at all clear: the top of the page says "On this WP:WSS subpage, you can propose new stub types (please read the procedures beforehand!), as well as the reorganization and subdivision of existing stub types." with no mention of templates. If you click on the link "procedures", it takes you to a section with the very clear bold heading "Proposing new stub types - procedure". I scanned down in case there was another section called "Proposing new stub templates - procedure". I didn't read the section with a heading which was irrelevant to what I wanted to do, so didn't spot the bold "This page only deals with stub TEMPLATES and CATEGORIES; we cannot help you with creating articles.", which is there - not visible when you first go to the page, as it's below the TOC.

But even then: I don't want to propose a new category, but a new template which would use two existing categories. I suppose this is what's called an "Upmerged template" in point 6, but it's not obvious then how to go about proposing one of those. Maybe this one comes under speedy S2. I'll give it a try. PamD 18:16, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

Every stub type has a stub template, and vice versa. So, your proposal is for a stub type dealing with schools in Tunisia - and the matching template will be {{Tunisia-school-stub}}. New categories may be ignored if you like; the stub template is likely to be set up to categorise under both Category:African school stubs and Category:Tunisia stubs. If there are a large number of suitable articles, we might create a special category as was done for Category:South African school stubs. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:57, 13 April 2012 (UTC)

Add a picture into template {{stub}}

Hello! I'm a wikipedian and I also do some edit in Chinese Wikipedia. I think the template {{stub}} should be improved. In Chinese Wikipedia, there's a picture in that template. I think it's a really good idea for readers to distinguish this template from other words. However, there's no photos like that in that of English Wikipedia! As a result, I think wikipedians who has the power to edit protected pages should add a similar picture in that template. --Jack No1 (talk) 15:38, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

The {{stub}} template is not really used directly any more on English Wikipedia, and usually it gets cleaned out daily of anything accidentally added, so it shouldn't matter if it has a picture or not. The general policy is that an image is not necessarily required, and a goal of stubs in general is to be unobtrusive - being intended for editors more-so than general readers. I prefer them to have pictures though and would like to see Category:Stub message boxes without images shrink, but I don't think {{stub}} itself needs one. --Qetuth (talk) 23:42, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

OK, maybe you're right. Different Wikipedia have different policy. --Jack No1 (talk) 05:39, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

The different aspect ratios, and in particular widths are a problem. I saw an astro stub with three templates today, it looked a mess. Rich Farmbrough, 02:40, 6 May 2012 (UTC).(Using some automation)

New report: Dubious stub categories

A new report has been created, it is Wikipedia:Database reports/Dubious stub categories. Comments, suggestions etc. should initially be made at User talk:MZMcBride#Sidenote. Pending potential refinement, I've not carried out any action based on the report output. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:07, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

New stub type?

See Wikipedia:Bot requests#Bot for Women.27s History project stubs. All the best. Rich Farmbrough, 02:12, 6 May 2012 (UTC).(Using some automation)

Help with report refresh

Need someone with experience with auto-generated reports to investigate. This report did not refresh for January:

Wikipedia:Database reports/Stubs included directly in stub categories

Can we please correct the issue so that we can get back to monthly updates? Dawynn (talk) 10:57, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

It's built by BernsteinBot (talk · contribs), which is operated by MZMcBride (talk · contribs) - I have left a message. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:13, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

This should be fixed now. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:12, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

2000's hip-hop album stubs

Would it be worth splitting out

2000's southern hip-hop album stubs
2000's experimental hip-hop album stubs

and maybe

2000's alternative hip-hop album stubs

Rich Farmbrough, 02:25, 6 May 2012 (UTC).(Using some automation)

We already have splits for East Coast and West Coast, so splitting by genre after decade is established, but there are no permcats for Southern and Experimental (although there is for Alternative) albums (see Category:Hip hop albums by genre). But in principle, it's not a bad idea so if the numbers support it, bring it to Proposals :) Severo^TC 15:22, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

An RFC had been created about the SFD process

Feel free to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Stub types for deletion#Do we really need this deletion discussion category?. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 12:58, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Mass update tools?

Are there any tools that would let us mass-update a list of articles? Could come in real helpful, especially when trying to tackle some of these overpopulated categories. Would be nice to have a tool that could take a provided list of articles, and search for a specified text sequence, and replace it with a different text sequence. Current example in Category:Beetle stubs. For every article that starts with "Mordellistina" (I could fairly easily drop them to a text list), change all occurrences of "[[Category:Mordellidae]]" to "[[Category:Mordellistena]]" and all occurrences of "{{beetle-stub}}" to "{{Mordellistena-stub}}". This is just one example. I'm certain such a tool would have many, many uses. Dawynn (talk) 20:47, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Isn't that what WP:AWB does? --Redrose64 (talk) 21:56, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for that suggestion. I will review how that tool works. Dawynn (talk) 22:06, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Duplicated stub cat

Category:WikiProject Motorcycling stubs has 2 members; Category:Motorcycle stubs has 664 members. Those in Category:Motorcycle stubs are also in Category:WikiProject Motorcycling stubs because of the way that {{Motorcycle-stub}} is constructed. Thoughts? --Redrose64 (talk) 18:30, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

I've always assumed that the two categories labeled 'WikiProject' (Category:WikiProject Computer science stubs and Category:WikiProject Motorcycling stubs) are not part of WPSS, but are instead maintained by the indicated wikiprojects. However, Category:Motorcycle stubs and the various categories and subcategories in Category:Computer science stubs are maintained by WPSS. I'd personally prefer that the two 'WikiProject' stub categories would have never been created. Dawynn (talk) 02:35, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

It might be worthwhile to drop a line on WP:CS and WP:M about renaming those cats to "Computer science stubs" and "Motorcycling stubs", if those cats don't already exist, as they do break the naming format. (Of course, "Stub-Class x articles" do not.) --Izno (talk) 03:05, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

How about this. We take the [[Category:WikiProject Motorcycling stubs]] out of {{Motorcycle-stub}} and add it to Category:Motorcycle stubs. That will make Category:Motorcycle stubs into a sub-cat of Category:WikiProject Motorcycling stubs --Redrose64 (talk) 09:24, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Your solution works okay, but in my opinion there is no reason for this category to exist. WikiProjects generally use the talk pages to track articles, and they already have Category:Stub-Class Motorcycling articles which tracks stubs. Maybe you would just depopulate Category:WikiProject Motorcycling stubs, or perhaps it should go to CFD. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:45, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Question about stub sorting

I think I'm feeling a sense of deja vu after reading the previous post. My questions are along the same line.

Every State in the US has a WikiProject and all of them have at least 2 categories for Stubs. One for the Stub template and 1 for the WikiProject. My question is, would it be appropriate to point the stub template to the Stub-Class category for the State projects and then eliminate the stub category. For example: Category:Arizona stubs and Category:Stub-Class Arizona articles. Other than a checks and balances system I don't see a huge benefit in separating the 2.
I am finding a lot of stubs in groups that all direct to the same Stub category but are separated by decade for example. So no matter whether you use 1910, 1920 - 1990, they all go into 20th Century X stubs. I have submitted a couple of groups for deletion but before I go hog wild with it I wanted to get some clarification on it. To me, it seems like we are overburdening ourselves by using overspecific stubs and then just dumping them all into one general category. In these cases, to me, it seems like it would be more beneficial to just say 20th century X stub or whatever with one stub template.Kumioko (talk) 00:53, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

The class system maintained by the WikiProjects and whether something exists as a stub are separate, and that's the case for every WikiProject. In other words, a project might rate items as a stub, whether or not there's a stub tag on the page. Or vice versa (I wouldn't expect that to be the case, but it's possible). There's also the case that multiple projects will add one particular article yet there not be a corresponding stub for that project on the page... or vice versa again (multiple stubs yet only one project). --Izno (talk) 02:59, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

The decade-specific stub tags would be split off into individual sub-categories when there are a sufficient quantity. To undo that tagging removes useful information and makes later organization quite difficult. - Dravecky (talk) 23:13, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Thats sort of true but over stubification is rather pointless too. If you have all the stubs going to the same category then there is very little need to break them down by decade. Especially if there is a generic higher level one that is normally used and all the rest either aren't used or aren't used much. I have seen many that have 10 to 20 or more stub templates, all with no or less than 5 articles, but all direct to the same category. It just seems to me that in these cases we are spending more time trying to categorize these stubs to the subatomic level than we should be. IMO the time would be better spent working on the articles and lessening the strain on the stub sorters than making sure that we have a stub for every decade for every time specific stub category. Just my opinion though. Kumioko (talk) 19:35, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

It's so that we can assess which sub-cats may be required in future. The idea is that initially the decade stub templates all pull in the same category; but when one of them is significantly used, we can then give it a dedicated sub-category.

Consider Category:Science fiction novel stubs - this has sub-cats for the decades from the 1950s to the 2000s, but not for decades before or since. The stub templates for these other decades presently upmerge to the main category; and we can tell from this tool that {{2010s-sf-novel-stub}} is transcluded 10 times, so it's not yet used widely enough to warrant a dedicated sub-cat. However, the possibility that more sf novels will be written between now and 2019 is quite high, so this number is likely to increase. When it gets to about 60 or so, all we should need to do is amend the |category= and |category1= parameters in {{2010s-sf-novel-stub}} and create the category.

But with only {{sf-novel-stub}}, and no decade-specific stub templates, it's more difficult to assess which decades may be required. Under such a system, if we do decide to create the sub-cat, we also need to create the new stub template, and put it onto 60+ articles in replacement of {{sf-novel-stub}}. This will be 62+ edits, as opposed to the two required by the present system. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:44, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Template:Buddhism-temple-stub

In the course of closing a recent discussion at WP:CFD, I came across Template:Buddhist-temple-stub and two questions which I could not answer:

Should the title be Buddhist-temple-stub or Buddhism-temple-stub? The exampe of {{Hindu-temple-stub}} suggests the former but the case of {{Buddhism-monastery-stub}} hints at the latter.
Should the template (or the Buddhism-... version) be converted into a redirect to Template:Buddhism-monastery-stub? The -temple template is used in only two articles (compared to the 275 of -monastery) and, more importantly, the -monastery template applies to "monaster[ies], temple[s and] nunner[ies]".

Thank you, -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 03:41, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Templates for sfd, sfdisc, sfr

Several templates associated with the WP:SFD and WP:WSS/D processses have been nominated for deletion, see Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2012 July 24#Template:Sfd top. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:40, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Stub size and scope question

I have found a lot of articles that are listed as Stubs either for a project or with a stub tag that to me are not stubs. One example is Chinquapin Airport. This to me looks like a start class article but before I start changing them en masse and what could easily turn into an editing dispute I was hoping for some clarification. Would this type of article with an infobox, an image, decent structure, categories, portal links, some references with what appears to me to be a pretty good start towards an article reasonably be considered a Start to anyone but me? Kumioko (talk) 23:17, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

In the case of this article, you can check in history that the stub tag was added when it was a lot smaller and simply never removed. I would probably remove this one (although its a bit borderline imo), not because of the picture, infobox, etc, but because of the length and detail of the lead+history sections. Generally, I think the amount of paragraph text, with infoboxes/navboxes/tables/lists removed, makes a good way to judge the real length of an article. I do, though, tend to leave a borderline case as it is, only adding or removing the tags when it is clearly across the line to me. I've never quite gotten the hang of being bold I guess.

The above though applies to the stub tags, not the project ratings: Some projects have their own topic-specific criteria for what is and isn't stub or start in their classifications. --Qetuth (talk) 23:50, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Kumioko (talk) 00:35, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Stub status generally is judged on the basis of the length of prose text, without considering 'peripherals' such as infoboxes, images, sections and links. Whether an article is a stub depends, in principle, on how long it would need to be in order to provide a comprehensive, encyclopedic treatment of the subject. That is often difficult to judge, unfortunately. As a general rule, I consider any article with less than 1,500 characters of prose—this corresponds roughly to about 250 words, on average—to be a stub, but not every article that is longer can be considered a non-stub. -- Black Falcon ^(talk) 05:40, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Untagged stub articles

We have this report that lists long articles with stub tags. Is there anything for short articles that do not have stub tags? Not sure where to draw the line on this, but maybe the opposite direction is the way to go. Can we identify the 1000 smallest articles that do not contain any stub tags? And can we create such a report on a weekly basis, just like we do for the long stub articles? Dawynn (talk) 13:41, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Thats a great idea. I would be surprised thuogh if User:MZMcBride didn't already have something built that would at least partially answer that question. I was going to sinc up the WikiProject Stub categories I watch over with some stub templates but I was afraid someone may scream. Kumioko (talk) 16:03, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

New report posted at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Short nonstubs for you. All seem to be missing useful categories, although many seem to be missing {{DAB}}, {{hndis}} and similar. - TB (talk) 09:18, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Fantastic! That's what I was looking for. Couple suggestions:

Please exclude articles that use the {{Wiktionary redirect}} template. (i.e. -word)
Please exclude articles that use the {{softredirect}} template
If possible, please also exclude lists. Maybe the easiest way to do this, is just to not list any article whose name starts with 'List of '. In my book, lists are a separate class, distinct from stubs.

Dawynn (talk) 11:56, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Changes incorporated and list rebuilt. Please note that changes made in the last 60 hours or so won't be reflected in the report; the toolserver's struggling a bit. - TB (talk) 19:00, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

I really like what you've done, and I would like to see this as a recurring, scheduled weekly report. The only issue I can see going forward is the hardcoded article length. I'm afraid that once we get through the initial load, such a small article size will only produce a small report. I would suggest putting a maximum limit of, say, 1500 chars, but limit the list to a maximum length of 1000 articles. 2nd option -- allow for multiple pages, each at a set length (500 articles? 1000?), and list all non-tagged articles less than 1500 chars. Dawynn (talk) 17:41, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Posted at Wikipedia talk:Database reports#Untagged stub articles. - TB (talk) 20:07, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

One final change. Please also exclude articles whose names begin with "Lists of ". Dawynn (talk) 11:26, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Collapsible intros on stub categories

Many stub categories have very long intros listing alternate stub tags that could be used. Examples are Category:India stubs or Category:American sportspeople stubs. These seem to be focused too much on stub sorters and getting in the way of what should be our target audience for these categories: Editors looking for articles they might be able to expand. These lists are in cases (like India) taking up more of the page than the actual list of stubs in the category does. Also, their value as a list of subcategories is now redundant to the automatically generated (and hence always up to date) Subcategories section.

Looking for a better answer than "They're too long, we should prune them", I think the more expansive lists in roots of major trees (such as country or occupation roots) should maybe be made collapsible and hidden by default. Now I think of it, is there a way to give them a consistent name like id=stublist to let stub sorters use their own css to make the lists display by default? --Qetuth (talk) 06:17, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

AWB auto-tagging

I've started a discussion at the Village Pump about AWB's auto-tagging; one of the issues raised is whether AWB should automatically add or remove stub tags. That's really only a sub-point I've tacked onto my main proposal, but I felt I should notify you for completion's sake. DoctorKubla (talk) 07:44, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Possibility of a multi-stub template?

I'd like to ask whether there is a method of creating a multi-stub template that would accept as arguments a list of other stub templates? I.e. is there a way of consolidating a stack of stub templates into a single template? (Another option could be for the multi-stub template to default to the normal stub template in the case where there is a single argument.) I'm not sure if this is even possible given current tools, but I do think it would help tidy things up a bit and allow for longer lists of stubs in an elegant manner. Regards, RJH (talk) 15:50, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

This is one of those proposals that comes up every year or so, and gets rejected. See, for example: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Archive 16#Multiple stub templates on the same page?; Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Archive 16#Why all these templates?. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:09, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

I see. Well there is clearly some interest in the idea then, but nobody has worked out a way to smoothly integrate it into the current process. I wonder then whether a simple collapsible table/template would serve the purpose? Thanks. Regards, RJH (talk) 20:42, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Discussion on AWB autotagging with {{stub}}

There's a discussion at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#AWB_auto-tagging of proposals including "AWB should not automatically add or remove the "stub" tag - this is also a matter of judgement, to be decided on a case-by-case basis". Stub specialists might like to contribute. PamD 20:35, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Should lists be tagged as stubs?

See discussion at Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs#AWB_tagging_short_lists_as_stubs_-_should_add_.7B.7Bexpand_list.7D.7D and User_talk:Hmains#Lists_are_not_stubs. PamD 19:55, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

And now at Wikipedia_talk:Stub#Can_lists_be_stubs.3F. PamD 07:09, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Templates nominated for deletion

Template:Sfd relist top and Template:Sfd relist bottom have been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the templates' entry on the Templates for discussion page. DH85868993 (talk) 12:23, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Can lists be stubs?

There is an active discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Stub#Can_lists_be_stubs.3F. -- Magioladitis (talk) 19:11, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Indeed. There was a notice made of this fact just a few sections above. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:20, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Stub cats with non-stub subcats

I've lost the guideline that says that the subcats of a stub cat must themselves be stub cats. In other words, the one that says that it's inappropriate for Category:Stub-class Foo articles to be a sub category of Category:Foo stubs. See User talk:Montanabw#Stub-Class equine articles. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:49, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, inquiring minds are curious, and some of us (the royal "we" at least) are hopelessly confused. Montanabw^(talk) 19:58, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

The stubs project has always been an independent maintenance project, rather than an evaluation and improvement project. That's one of the reasons that you won't find non-stub categories inside stub categories. We also maintain all the stub subcategories and have size limitations on them. The category you placed inside a stub category is too large; it would have to be broken up into smaller subcategories, and that goal of the Stub WP is counter to the needs of the Equine WP.

However, in this particular instance there's an additional logical problem. "Equines" are not a subset of "Horses", rather it's the other way around. All horses are equines, but not all equines are horses. So, it's logically flawed to place an equine category into a horse category. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:58, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Technically, but there is no

This equine-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

. Montanabw^(talk) 22:36, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

...and there won't be, because that stub name is too generic to be allowed under stub sorting project criteria. The "equine" project categories do not distinguish between horses and their riders when categorizing stub articles. They're all lumped together within the same category in a way that the stub sorting project would not do. --EncycloPetey (talk) 05:13, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Ahh, so Kevin Bacon is an equine but not a horse? :P

Just trying to explain my thoughts on why things are done that way: Stub evaluation categories have a completely different scope and organisation to stub categories: That Category:Horse stubs should not contain an equestrian olympian but Category:Stub-Class equine articles should is just one example of this. I imagine there would be many stub categories connected to any given Project. For that matter, stub evaluation categories hold talk pages, while stub categories hold actual articles. Having one as a subcategory of the other may screw up certain searching searching methods and reports. I certainly don't have a problem with a more prominent link being created between them, but sub-categorisation doesn't seem the right way to do it. I'd suggest a link in the notes at the top of the stub category. If this were to become a standard thing across many stub cats/projects, perhaps a template is called for (not to DO anything, just as a quick consistent way to add the text "You might also be interested in helping expand the articles at project Foo" that might get more attention than the usual talk page boxes) --Qetuth (talk) 00:21, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Actually, we do have an equestrian-bio-stub, but it doesn't get used a lot. Could one of you demonstrate what you mean by editing the equine/horse cat so I can see the concept in action? I guess my confusion is what difference there is between stub evaluation and stub categories, seems like the goal of both is to flag and expand stubs, but the only difference I see is that one goes into project categorization, usually posted on the talk page and the other is a flag in the article space ... ? Montanabw^(talk) 22:57, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

WikiProject Stub Sorting deals only with stubs, but deals with all articles that are stubs, regardless of topic. Stub sorting is simply about logging and sorting any stubs that are found. Period. Once sorted into manageably-sized categories, the stub articles are ignored here; we don't expand them. By contrast, the WP Equine stub category is part of a larger series of categories including Start, C, B. GA, FA articles; all these articles are thematically related, and are not necessarily stubs. WP Equine is interested in expanding and improving articles, and uses an evaluation system to accomplish that goal. They may flag an article as a stub, or they may not, and they rate the importance of the article with regard to the project as well as its level of development. Thus, the two projects are working in entirely different areas. With WP Stub Sorting, the tagging and categorizing is the only goal. With WP Equine, the goal is to expand articles to get them out of a stub category; the stub category is not the goal. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:44, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

There is also a difference in what is included: horse-stub or equestrian-bio-stub or so on are applied only to articles which fit that categorisation - horse-stub should be applied only to articles about horses, equestrian-bio-stub should only be used on biographies of equestrians. This is sorting all stubs wp-wide into a tree. Often the stub evaluation class of a project, on the other hand, contains articles which are of interest to the project, even if from the articles point of view it is not the purpose of the article. I will look for a good example to show the difference tonight...--Qetuth (talk) 05:56, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

OK, so stub sorting into categories is done for what purpose? Aren't they both for helping editors find stubs that need expansion? And, so if I put {{foo-stub}} on the article page, what happens behind the scenes, as opposed to what happens when a project adds the [[Wikiproject Foo|class=stub]] on the talk page? I guess I thought they sort of did the same thing in the background...? Montanabw^(talk) 18:56, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Is there anyone out there looking at stub proposals?

I've just had a discussion with an editor who has expressed concern at the lack of any response to stub proposals, given that editors are recommended not to boldly create stubs and stub types but to wait for approval from this project. (He had created a {{camping-stub}} and corresponding category, and I cleaned it up a bit for him as well as listing it at Proposals). Is anyone doing anything to the backlog?

No, I'm not interested in taking on the work myself: I'm not convinced that the formal structures of this project are actually sensible, though I keep on stub-sorting in the meantime. I had several days off-wiki lately and was disappointed to see that some of the same stubs were in Category:Stubs when I returned - perhaps lots of stub-sorters are on holiday?. Or is this project just gently collapsing for lack of interest, in which case we need to tell the world so. PamD 09:08, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Usually proposals is pretty active, and it's just discoveries, deletion, archiving and stub types list that have a huge backlog. I've been working away at various stub-sorting activities whenever I have time, I'll try and keep a closer eye on the proposals page. --Qetuth (talk) 10:51, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood - it's at discoveries. Nothing ever seems to happen there. Personally I think discoveries should be redundant to proposals and deletions (wherever that ends up) depending on what the discover thinks should happen....--Qetuth (talk) 10:55, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, my mistake - Discoveries it is! PamD 14:28, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Category: Stub categories

Should all stub categories be in cat Stub categories? or should some subcategories, subsubcats, and so on (nested) not be there?

P.S. I have "bannered" Category talk: Stub categories for this project. The one recent question asks about search. I don't know how well /Stub types may serve the purpose. --P64 (talk) 23:06, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

I believe the template that should be at the top of each stub category automatically adds it to Category:Stub categories. So it should be an index of all of them (which have the right template). For the nested tree system, look under Category:Top-level stub categories. Again, in theory everything should be somewhere under there, but I have never thoroughly checked that with some of the more miscellaneous categories. A quick check already found two which are not in the tree: Category:Wikipedia stubs and Category:Urban studies and planning stubs.

/Stub types is not as useful imo as /List of stubs - They both use the same source lists, but one is an index of links while the other transcludes some but not all. The only advantage to having such an unworkably large page would be the ability to text search it for what you are looking for, but as it doesn't transclude all subpages, that purpose is defeated and we just end up with two versions of the same page. --Qetuth (talk) 23:37, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Eliminate stub templates?

At Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Layout#Swapping_order_of_categories_and_stub_templates there is a discussion about the order of categories and stub templates where an editor has suggested considering the elimination of all stub templates. I've suggested that they pursue that discussion at Wikipedia talk:Stub instead. PamD 07:02, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Discoveries

Since I can't make a new subpage, and September is missing, someone should check out these which don't seem to have been proposed:

-- 76.65.131.248 (talk) 05:48, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Standardising stub sortkey stars

I have been trying to standardise the sortkey prefixes on the stub category tree. A survey made it appear that the system in most places was to use '*' for locations, and ' ' otherwise, so that geographical divisions are listed seperate from other divisions, so that is what I have been spreading around (UK and HK did the opposite, as did a few other little islands of resistance, such as every second branch of scientists). I have ignored "Stubs by foo" cats as there seemed no popular standard, and ignored categories by century/decade for the same reason. Now I'm looking at the Category:Animal stubs tree and every branch seems to use a different system - not only that, but there is often two or three types of subcategory it would be good not to mix, but neither is locational.

So I propose the following guide, to be refined and published somewhere in the stub sorting instructions:

' ' - General subcategories
'#' - Time based subcategories
'*' - Location based subcategories
'~' - Species based subcategories
'+' - Special subcategories that should be kept seperate from the rest but don't fit any of the above
'Σ' - Stub categories with extra non-stub parents
'τ' - Template categories

Any thoughts? --Qetuth (talk) 09:08, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

If subcategories are split in only one way, why do we need anything? (I remember there used to be a technical bug thing about this - if you only had (say) articles beginning with A-B shown on the category pages (as first 200), then only subcats beginning with A-B would be shown, hence the need for a sort-code at the beginning of the ASCII order, but I believe that's no longer an issue.) Severo^TC 22:41, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Ah, so that's where the system came from. As far as why worry about cats only split one way, there is no guarantee that will remain the case in the future, and there is consistency with siblings to consider. On further thought though, the #~+ are probably overkill, I was just hoping to support a clearer definition of when to space and when to star. --Qetuth (talk) 00:36, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Script question from a newbie

I'm trying to find a script like HotCat but for stub types to quickly and easily search for and add specific stub types to articles. Does such a thing exist? I searched around and didn't turn anything up. --Batard0 (talk) 16:28, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

No. A HotCat style one would be fantastic, if anyone out there is reading this and fancies designing it :P Severo^TC 22:43, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

There is User:Ais523/stubtagtab2.js which pretty much does what you're asking for. Legoktm (talk) 23:01, 18 October 2012 (UTC)