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Suggestion for "General Rules"

this pertains to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting#General_rules

Following from the "Big stubs" discussion, and if this is not covered elsewhere, could a line be added to the "General Rules" as follows?

No stub article should sit in only the stub category. If no other category is listed, add the standard article category that is the parent of the stub category.

This would be helped by providing an index to the standard article categories in which stub categories reside, either as part of the stub types page or as a separate list to be consulted when needed.

Courtland 01:37, 2005 May 30 (UTC)

I agree. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 06:46, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sounds good. I'm pretty sure there is a project aiming at making sure there are no uncategorised articles, but we may as well save them some work. Grutness...wha? 06:51, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

WE DID IT!

Virtually every stub has been sorted! Congradulations everyone who helped out! JOB WELL DONE!!! I'm proud to say that I sorted, at the very least, over 1000 stubs. Great job everyone and let's keep those numbers low!! Linuxbeak | Talk | Desk 00:58, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

Congratulations! Now, to the next level on the stub hierarchy... --cesarb 01:10, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Isn't bio-stub bigger than stub itself ever was? - SoM 01:22, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Probably about as big as the largest stub ever was. And slowly being split by nationality and occupation. That's probably the next big target, especially since geography is done and history is at least partly split. Grutness...wha? 01:28, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
On May 16th, the People stubs category had 16328 entries. Now it has 15805, and dropping as we speak. --Joy [shallot] 01:01, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It sure took us a while, but it finally happened! It's been a fun ride, but there's no reason for us to quit now. There is a lot to be done, still. As it has been pointed out by SoM and Grutness, bio-stubs are our most logical target now. Let's keep our eyes open for new generic stub and continue our work. Cheers! --Sn0wflake 01:56, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Time to update the project page to send people there? Susvolans (pigs can fly) 12:10, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
We should send a press release to the Wikipedia Signpost! Joe D (t) 02:05, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Sounds like a decent a idea. --Sn0wflake 02:27, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Agreed. --cesarb 02:57, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Excellent. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 12:10, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Great work guys! Is this actually all stubs or are there still stubs turning up as they are edited (except for newly created ones, of course)? If so, we can finally rename Category:Stub to Category:Stubs. -- grm_wnr Esc 08:34, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
There don't seem to be old stubs turning up, but new articles containing the template still get created, so it still needs some attention. --Joy [shallot] 19:45, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Now that {{stub}} and {{geo-stub}} are both holding pens for stub sorting, would it be easier if there was just one category to check? Susvolans (pigs can fly) 12:10, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There are still plenty of small articles that I run across while systematically sifting that look like a stub article but aren't labelled as such. Slapping a label on those is one thing that keeps the inflow of stubs going (not to {{stub}} but to the categories). Courtland 22:29, 2005 May 31 (UTC)

This act unfortunately (usually) has the effect of triggering a defensive response from the author. Oh well. --TheParanoidOne 05:20, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Our experiences differ a bit; I'd characterize it as "sometimes". I think the availability of the categorized stubs gives authors more confidence that the article is not being labeled as "too short to be in an encyclopedia" as adding a generic {{stub}} might give the impression of. In other words, I think a result of all the work that is being celebrated by this thread here is that the impression of a stub-label is becoming, I dare say, positive rather than negative, an indication that someone cared enough to look at and tag my article for expansion. Courtland 12:54, 2005 Jun 1 (UTC)
Heh. Silver lining. :) I agree with most of what you are saying. I was just pointing out an observation, based on my experience. Nothing more, nothing less. :) --TheParanoidOne 14:25, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Even though I've been sorting stubs for only a couple weeks, I had fun. I, too, will move on to the People stubs category now. Thunderbrand 17:04, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

Stub threshold

Just been thinking, is there much of a difference between Category X-stub and Category X with a stub threshold turned on in preferences? Pcb21| Pete 09:22, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

In short:
  1. Stub threshold doesn't work on category listings, I just tried it
  2. Even if it did, it would only look at the text length (which is only incidentially related to stubbiness)
  3. Even if it did that, it would also show all other articles
  4. And even if wouldn't do that, the feature is sometimes turned off because it's taxing on the servers
-- grm_wnr Esc 10:42, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Well the bug identified in point one is a bit of killer :(. I wonder if fixing it would introduce problems relating it point four? Pcb21| Pete 12:01, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Well I filed a bug report on point 1), and Brion patched it the head of 1.5 almost immediately which I think is great news. Hence 1) is not an issue. 2) is partially, it only looks at text length, but I disagree that this only incidentally related to stubiness. In practice there is a strong correlation indeed. Further the stub threshold gives us a very fine degree of control. E.g. when I only want to identify real stubs I browse at 250bytes. But for other purposes I browse at 1000. The stub categories only give a yes/no. Further one individual's perception of a stub is often just as inaccurate as the automatic method. I regard 3) as a feature. It would enable us to get an idea how "stubby" a whole area of articles is. This is great for determining coverage. Re 4) the reason that the bug was fixed in 1.5 so easily is that there have been some changes such that this sort of thing is less taxing so, although this feature has almost never been turned off, it will be turned off even less in the future. All in all I think 1.5 looks set to be a big win for those interested in tracking and categorising stubs. Pcb21| Pete 14:52, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I think we can agree on that both methods (human and automatic) have their benefits. Stub sorters obviously believe in the usefulness of human sorting, but having other, additional methods available can't be bad in any case. And my "feature may be turned off" comment is based on the experience I had: When ventured to try this out the first time, it was turned off (and by the way, thanks for not noting anywhere that it was turned off, Anonymous Developer Who Did That. It was mightily confusing). After that I never used it again until you mentioned it here, but it seems I was just unlucky. -- grm_wnr Esc 17:09, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
See m:MediaWiki 1.5 for more about MediaWiki 1.5 and http://test.leuksman.com for a chance to try it out. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 15:09, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
In my opinion, this feature should be rewritten so the criteria are not size based but based on the stub labels or other activity-based criteria; for instance ...
  • a toggle that turns on or off the presentation of articles labeled as stubs (i.e. have a template with the name "xxx-stub" <= a good use of the standardization).
  • a "historical edits" threshold (i.e. show me only articles that have >10 edits) which could be combined with the stub-toggle
  • a toggle to turn on or off presentation of articles in the Special:Shortpages listing of the 1000 shortest articles (running from 0 to ~75 bytes).
Courtland 22:39, 2005 May 31 (UTC)
This looks interesting, but realistically I think a lot of this will have to be done on the client-side using some funky user javascript for the forseeable future. Pcb21| Pete 14:52, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

more pages for Centralisation project

I think the centralisation project also needs to consider a couple more pages - one old, one new - which aren't mentioned:

Grutness...wha? 01:14, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I am about to begin work on "perfect stub article", so I could do some work on those pages also. I might be able to kill "naming guidelines" by merging it into Wikipedia:Stub, but I don't know if that is something you would find interesting. --Sn0wflake 02:15, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Mmmm. Not sure. I think the page is useful, as it gives precedents and a place to lsit exceptions that we might want to fix. Also, it's a bit long for a merge. It might be worth copying the summary from the top of the page to Wikipedia:Stub and putting a link to the rest from there. Grutness...wha? 02:53, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
More than reasonable. I inted to look work on it all tonight, but consider that as a "by the end of the week" in case that doesn't happen. :) --Sn0wflake 19:28, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Maybe also the odd Wikipedia:Stubbing...Circeus 13:18, Jun 1, 2005 (UTC)

I have been considering sending it to VfD for a while now... or maybe a sysop could just speedy it. If you guys have no objections I will put it on VfD. --Sn0wflake 19:28, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Sounds OK, or maybe transwiki to Wiktionary? Do you think "stub" itself in the Wikipedia sense would be OK to put up in Wiktionary? Courtland 23:22, 2005 Jun 1 (UTC)
It would probably meet some resistance, but I don't see it as something hard to overcome. I am not very familiar with the Wiktionary, though. So you should probably add it and see what happens. Stub, I mean. Stubbing is weird neologism at its very worst. --Sn0wflake 23:31, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Well, golly gee ma', it's already there @ Wiktionary:Stub as definition 3. Courtland 23:36, 2005 Jun 1 (UTC)
Why not just redirect Wikipedia:Stubbing to Wikipedia:Stub? Grutness...wha? 02:32, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Done. --Sn0wflake 04:50, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

{{UK-bio-stub}}

Didn't have a category attached to it. I've attached Category:British people stubs now, but this might hurt some of the initial bio-stub sortings, since it was listed on Category:People stubs - SoM 01:22, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It seems to have only been without a category for a couple of hours, since someone moved the template somewhere. Still annoying. - SoM 01:25, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Goodbye "Perfect stub article"

"Wikipedia:Perfect stub article" was heavily edited, merged and now redirects to Wikipedia:Stub. Feel free to improve and discuss the new section Ideal stub article as you see fit. I also took the opportunity to link Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Naming guidelines directly from the main article. ;) Cheers! --Sn0wflake 01:07, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It's looking good... but I can't help but wonder whether we need to spell out a bit more clearly to come to WP:WSS beofre making a new stub type. At the moment it's tucked away as the last line of the "New stub categories" section... perhaps we need one extra sentence at the top of that section saying something like "Proposed new stub types are debated at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria.", then carrying on with the rest of the section from there? Grutness...wha? 02:38, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
See if you find the way I've inserted your idea suitable. It generates some level of repetition, but hey... if it's emphasis we are looking for... --Sn0wflake 05:06, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Exthellent. Grutness...wha? 06:35, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

stub template position

I asked this question at Wikipedia talk:Stub, and was advised to ask here instead:

The Stub guideline says

These stub templates should invariably be placed at the bottom of the article.

Is that strictly required? I prefer to put the stub template above headings such as External links or References, and succession boxes or related concept boxes. This way readers will realise the article is incomplete (and consider adding to it) before they get to the "boring" stuff at the bottom of the page. An alternate wording might be These stub templates should be placed at the bottom of the text of the article. --ScottDavis 09:21, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Ohh... so it's you who's been doing that! The messages are supposed to be as unobtrusive as possible, and they really hurt the eyes coming in above the external links. They're not aimed promarily at casual readers, after all - they're for editors. And the sort of person who will edit an article is the sort of person who will also take note of external links. Article, then links, then stub template, then categories, then other wikis is the standard order I've always used. Grutness...wha? 09:56, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The placement of the stub templates is a fairly long-standing tradition for the Wikipedia. Although I've never seen the original arguments for the placement, my personal opinion is that I like the constancy of always having the stub templates in the same place as the very last text in the article. You don't want a too prominent position for the stub templates, but since they are not just for experienced Wikipedia editors, they should not be hidden away on the talk pages either. It would be interesting to see how many new Wikipedia Users were encouraged to do their first edit of a Wikipedia article because of the topic stubs. BlankVerse ∅ 10:00, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yeah - it's me who does that! I don't think I'm the only one. I've only just found the instruction that I shouldn't. Stub templates without a picture (like {{Australia-geo-stub}} at the moment) are fairly unobtrusive where I put it. I guess the ones with a picture are a little more obtrusive, but that's not the trend at the moment. Is the stub template at District Council of Lower Eyre Peninsula or David Tonkin for example really too painful compared to putting it below the boxes? --ScottDavis 13:30, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Not so much painful as truncating. It's very easy to read to the stub template then stop, and not scroll down to where there was a huge mass more information in the form of a template link box. This is particularly so with the second one, because of the large white space under the article and before the template boxes start. A stub template basically implies "this is all we have - someone needs to expand this". Only in those two cases, it's not all we have - the article has quite a number of links and information about related articles after the stub template. There is a reason why it's suggested that the templates should go at the end - because they imply that where they are is the end of the article. Putting them before the external links and template boxes is like putting the back cover on a book before the index. And that's why I - and a considerable number of other stub sorters - correct any article we find with the stub templates in the wrong place. Still, at least you're not putting them right at the top like some people have been known to... Grutness...wha? 14:16, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
OK. I still dislike the guideline, but will attempt to follow it from now on until (if) it's changed. Incidentally, I wasn't the person who put the second one there (although it was where I'd have put it). Thanks ScottDavis 14:37, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Just letting you know that I agree with Scott's reasoning and would like the official position changed. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 11:30, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
My personal opinion os that the stub templates should be the last thing before any of the navigation boxes and any infoboxes at the bottom. When they are placed below the navigation boxes I think that even experienced Wikipedia editors will often miss them. They should NOT, however, be placed above the External links and/or See also sections where they look quite ugly and misplaced in my opinion. BlankVerse ∅ 13:28, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I am presently putting stub-templates as the very last thing in an article regardless of content except for interwiki-links (to different languages), above which I put the template. I think that it is the category that matters most for folks looking for articles to expand rather than a line of text in the article. If someone desires to expand on a part of an article, they will do so regardless of whether or not there is a stub-notice. On the other hand, someone who is not desirous of expanding an article will not be influenced to do so by the appearance of a stub-notice. Courtland 17:16, 2005 Jun 19 (UTC)
The essential problem with this argument is that the stub template itself is merely an usful feature. What matters is the inclusion of said article on the correct stub category. I am of the opinion that they should be placed just above the categories and interwikis, in order for them to be as unobstrusive as possible. I do, however, undersrand the appeal of having them placed just below the main body of text. It's an interesting idea. The problem? There are tens of thousands of stubs already using the current format. Unless you are willing to manually change each and every of them (a bot would likely cause some havoc), I don't see that happening. --Sn0wflake 21:13, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
That's where I have been putting them, for the very reasons you stated. --TheParanoidOne 22:17, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I also think that the stubs should be placed after the categories, so that the stub-cat is the last in the list. For the reasons mentioned above, the categories included in an article, are there for the expansion of the topic. Stubs are more for the editor rather than the reader, so a stub-cat listed first wouldnt not necessarily make a reader want to expand the article, as the stub itself already does that. We should have the categories that pertain directly to the content of the article first. For the point that there are currentyl thousands of articles already laid out in this manner, if we set a standard now, then they will eventually get updated by editors in the future and is not a good reasoning for not setting a standard. Thus, reguardless of where the stub is placed, it will be placed in the stub-categories, which is important, so there is little reason to place it before the relevant article categories. <>Who?¿? 5 July 2005 00:28 (UTC)

Clearly it should be after the article text, but before the links.

  1. It's the article that is a stub, not the links
  2. Newcomers won't see it if it's buried in the depths of the references and muck, and think the article is as big as it will ever get.

Stubs are lame - Omegatron 00:59, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

I'd have said the opposite - the links are part of the article, so putting it after the article means putting it after the links. And it's more -not less - likely to be noticed below all the other text than somewhere in the middle of the article. Grutness...wha? 04:47, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Category:WikiProject Stub sorting and Category:WikiProject Stub sorting participants

I was thinking of spinning off a new subpage out of the ultra-long participants list, but then I thought it would be better to make a category. So here it is: Category:WikiProject Stub sorting participants. Can this replace the list? If you think so, please unlist yourself and add this category to your user page. If not, well, the two can coexist. Of course I'm not going around and editing 80+ user pages...

Also, as a parent to that category I created Category:WikiProject Stub sorting, which you can also check out and expand. Is anything missing? Maybe we can cut down on our subpagecruft this way. -- grm_wnr Esc 16:07, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, but that would require me to make a user page, rather than just having a redirect to my talk page. And I can't be bothered to make a page just for that (or have a blank page with a Cat at the bottom) - SoM 18:48, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Well, of course you can put it on your talk page, too. -- grm_wnr Esc 19:45, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

An excellent idea. Which made me notice something: Wikipedia:Stub sorting policy is now contained within Wikipedia:Stub. Clear and redirect? --Sn0wflake 20:01, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As there was no opposition, Wikipedia:Stub sorting policy is now dead. --Sn0wflake 15:56, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Good move. Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Guidelines as well, maybe? -- grm_wnr Esc 20:33, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
The information seems to have been completely absorbed by the main article, so I don't see why not. Will wait for input once more, though. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 04:29, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Guidelines is now dead. --Sn0wflake 17:38, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Sounds like a good idea - as you say, all the information there is in the main article. Another couple of possible pages for the category:
Grutness...wha? 08:05, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It would also probably be worth listing Wikipedia:Stub or one of the other main WP:WSS pages at Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines#Guidelines_regarding_grouping_techniques_for_articles. Grutness...wha? 09:14, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As for Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs, I can see that meeting oposition, but the best course of action would be redirecting it to your plaintext list; I support that move. As for Wikipedia: Most wanted stubs, I really have no idea. For the addition on Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines#Guidelines_regarding_grouping_techniques_for_articles, that's your call, really. :) --Sn0wflake 20:42, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

A reminder

A quick reminder that - just because we cleared Category:Stub that doesn't mean it isn't going to fill again. There are currently about 80 stubs in there (including, peculiarly, a load of user pages that weren't there the other day). Grutness...wha? 00:09, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I am taking care of the User pages with the stub tag, as before. Those appeared quite suddenly, though. The database must have taken a while to update them. --Sn0wflake 00:34, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, the servers were busy clearing their throats before trying to swallow more stub-meal. :) Courtland 21:42, 2005 Jun 5 (UTC)

A new feature for stub templates?

I just read this suggestion Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Add google link to stub templates?, which I don't think is a good idea, but I did come up with a different idea on enhancing some of the stub templates. There are a few WikiProjects that have added a link to their page in their topic stubs (see {{Doctorwho-stub}} and {{Cvg-stub}} for examples). I don't think, however, that the topic stubs need an explicit link to their associated WikiProject, but it would be nice to find a way to add a "hidden" link to each WikiProject.

In particular, the Village Pump proposal used an Australia stub as an example, so I suggested: "I think that a much better way to improve the usefulness of the topic stubs is link to the appropriate WikiProject or Regional notice boards when one exists. For this particular example, you could have the "Australia-related" text link to the Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board. From there, each of the WikiProjects and Regional notice boards can create a special subpage that lists topic specific search engines, online reference sources, etc. that are valuable for expanding the stubs for that topic." BlankVerse ∅ 10:03, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

A lot of countries and regions now have wikiportals - would it be worth considering linking to them? Grutness...wha? 10:50, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Notice on talk pages

Many other projects place a notice on the talk page for associated articles, directing users to the Proiect page for further information. Given the occasional confusion when people are unfamiliar with the usual methods of the project, would this be a good idea, something along the lines of this:

Stub-sorting Wikiproject

This stub-notice is maintained by WikiProject Stub sorting, an attempt to bring some sort of order to Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can choose to improve/expand the articles containing this stub notice, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

The image can be suppressed by adding display:none to the appropriate CSS attribute; however I don't think this would be such an issue since it would appear once per stub template rather than in each and every stub article. I would suggest calling it {{WikiProject Stub sorting}} as per some other projects. --Phil | Talk 14:41, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)

I had been thinking of doing the same thing. "Make it so." BlankVerse ∅ 15:41, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Sounds like a reasonable addition. Courtland 18:11, 2005 Jun 8 (UTC)

General Rules addition appears

The last line in General Rules was inserted by Tagishsimon today and reads 

If the article is no longer a stub, remove the stub template.

This is a good addition in principle, but it leaves up in the air without explanation an often asked question: When is a stub article no longer a stub? That is a really context dependent question and I'd suggest that this line be removed as being an obvious general principle, that you remove the label from something when it is no longer that thing that the label says it is, even though some of the other templates do include a "remove when.." statement which can be quite as vague as the criterion for graduation from stub-dom. Courtland 18:24, 2005 Jun 5 (UTC)

I have made an addition to that sentence as a temporary measure, until a decision is made. My opinion is that that piece of information is irrelevant to the project, as it is already contained within Wikipedia:Stub. --Sn0wflake 20:37, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Actually I don't think it is contained in Wikipedia:Stub. The criterion there is "clearly too short"; the question at hand isn't when first to put a stub-template on but when to take it off and the same definition doesn't necessarily apply. There are some folks who would say "I doubled the length of the article; therefore, it's not a stub anymore" when it goes from 2 lines to 4 lines. It's that interpretation problem that I'd prefer us to avoid as most of us do tend to stub articles that are truly "clearly too short" and only those of us in the particular knowledge area of the article are well suited to make an interpretation when "too short" is "just long enough", particularly in the situation which often pertains where one person adds a line or two then another person adds another few lines, and the article grows slowly as opposed to suddenly being well enhanced by a single person (instances that are in the minority). It is this contextual dependence on when enough is enough that makes me very reluctant to remove a stub notice from an article once placed unless I've had a hand in contributing to the article myself. Courtland 21:40, 2005 Jun 5 (UTC)
Hey there, Courtland. I was actually referring to 3 to 10 short sentences. When a stub goes beyond ten or twelve clearly written and well-structured senteces, I believe it is fit to be considered an article. If you could make clear what is a good definition of a short article to you, we (the WSS in general, including you of course) could reach a consensus on this issue. I particularly don't agree with the inclusion of said line on the project's page because it has nothing to do with our main goal, which is sorting stubs; but then again, that's just my opinion. --Sn0wflake 23:18, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
FWIW, I remove the stub template from any article I find which, when editing, fills the edit window twice over (except on those cases where that includes a long list or similar). It does vary from case to case though. The more important the subject, the longer the article can be and still be a stub, in my eyes. For instance, in my work with geo-stubs, a small article on a small village may be less of a stub than a long article on a national capital - which article is more a stub - Croughton, Northamptonshire or Niamey? Grutness...wha? 01:22, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Stub sorting bot

I have put a proposal for a bot to sort biography stubs at Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 40#Stub_sorting_bot. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 17:12, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Project page cleanup

I cleaned up the project page quite drastically, please review. I left the stub finding methods "Google" section alone for now, but since it only lists methods for finding unsorted {{stub}}s and this problem is under control now, I think it's past its prime as well and can be shortened, or even removed. Comments? -- grm_wnr Esc 20:14, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Is it worth rewriting it as instructions to sort {{bio-stub}}? Susvolans (pigs can fly)
I did so, and added some other things as well. The whole Google list was unnecessary though, since the other stub categories don't suffer from the same "doesn't show up in category listings" bug as {{stubs}} did. I removed it. -- grm_wnr Esc 10:47, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Good job. reflects the shift in project focus nicely. google business was only useful when there were lots of stubs, which is thankfully not the case anymore. thanks Bluemoose 11:03, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Stub

Given that the category is now Category:Stubs, should this page be similarly named? Grutness...wha? 06:22, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't think so, because Wikipedia:Stub explains the term (singular), and Category:Stubs is a collection of the items (plural). -- grm_wnr Esc 10:32, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I agree that Wikipedia:Stub should use the singular. There is also a redirect in place in case anyone should try to use the plural. --Allen3 talk 11:14, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)
Agree and agree. --Sn0wflake 19:50, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Page consolidation, next chapter

Three lists to maintain - not good. We can't actually put them all together on one page, since Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs is transcluded on Wikipedia:Template messages. I propose the following:

  1. Redirect Wikipedia:Stub categories to Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types
  2. Put a (very) short version of the present Wikipedia:Stub categories on Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs alongside a link to the full and official list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types.

Also: Can we take WP:SFD for a spin now? -- grm_wnr Esc 10:51, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The proposed page consolidations look very reasonable to me - I'd suggest just the main parents (e.g., bio-stub, geo-stub, and the like) on the template messages page - it's impractical to have to change all the lists every time (it's hard enough trying to keep up with one!). As for WP:SFD - please! :) Grutness...wha? 13:01, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
User:ABCD posted info on SFD going live to the mailing list wikiEN-l [1]. I'm waiting if there are negative reactions (but not for a week again), after that I think it's good to go.
As for the stub listings: I checked again, and actually Wikipedia:Stub categories transcludes Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs. But two lists are still a pain to keep up-to-date - I'm going to give my above plan a try. -- grm_wnr Esc 18:14, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As I wrote elsewhere but should include here, I would suggest that the Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs be dropped altogether. I don't see a compelling reason to have a page of examples when examples are a click away from the Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types page and present on stub articles that persons visiting the stub types page will have (or will) see. What I was trying to do on the page that got trimmed (gutted was the word I used before) was satisfy quietly and slowly a request to add category links either in addition to or in replacement of links to templates; I thought this was a very reasonable request and still do. I'm thinking how the new stub types list could be enriched to include direct category links ... but I definitely don't want to pack it in just to add it as one could easily push the page over in to "too rich" territory. For instance, I started adding the footnotes for permanent redirects (some but not all yet) but I'm reconsidering that now as a step into "too rich" territory. Courtland 16:38, 2005 Jun 11 (UTC)

Adding a link to the category is a good idea - that is a reasonable and helpful thing. As long as the stub template itself is not included on the list page I'm all for meta-information on the list. I think I'll start doing this now. -- grm_wnr Esc 21:02, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Animated images

Question, should animated images be used in the stub templates or no? The template in question is the Hong Kong stub template. Zscout370 (Sound Off) 21:33, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think the answer to this may be No. I haven't seen any stub templates (or any templates, for that matter) with animated images. Besides, we may be moving away from stub images completely. --TheParanoidOne 21:53, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Animated images are frowned upon in Wikipedia in general. High use moving images doubly so, I would have thought. And not all browsers can handle them successfull, either. Grutness...wha? 07:28, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
If we don't have a policy against them then we should - they are very disctracting, IMHO. -Willmcw 23:43, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)
Ok. Just making sure, since the animated image in question now, Image:Hkicon.gif has been removed from Template:Hong Kong-stub and the image is now at WP:IFD. Zscout370 (Sound Off) 01:22, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I agree with Willmcw - I removed the animations from both Hong Kong-stub and HK-geo-stub - took a while, though, because they kept crashing my browser. I appreciate what the maker of them was trying to do, but they were very distracting. Stub messages are meant to be unobtrusive. Grutness...wha? 02:38, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Ok, that sounds good. I hope the IFD process goes well. Zscout370 (Sound Off) 23:03, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I just removed the animated image from Template:Hong-Kong-edu-stub. dbenbenn | talk 01:13, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

How many more stubs could it has been added it too? Zscout370 (Sound Off) 02:55, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The hunt continues

1. have killed Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs, objections?

The redirect should go the other way around. This will also fix the double-redirects created by this redirection. --Joy [shallot] 23:24, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Reverted, waiting for more input. --Sn0wflake 01:15, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I'd stick with your first move. It's easy enough to fix the redirects, and keeping it listed under the WikiProject gives a further hint not to create new templates without going through WP:WSS first. The other option would simply be to have Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs show only the one main stub category and (in big letters) a link to the full list. Moving the full list to TM/S will only encourage some clown helpful soul to format it like the other TM lists - which is what we were trying to avoid by making the WP:WSS/ST list in the first place. Grutness...wha? 01:49, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I reverted as a courtesy, but this article is by far the most useless on the project. It needs to be put to rest and that's what I just did. All double-redirects have been fixed. User:Joy, feel free to express your opinion on the issue in case you feel strongly about this. --Sn0wflake 02:10, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

2. I am looking into doing an overhaul of the Wikipedia:Substub page, in order to trim it down and leave mostly some historical information. Objections? --Sn0wflake 17:46, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Template:Notstub

Anyone know anything about this one? Grutness...wha? 01:53, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The discussion on the talk page was last added to in September 2004 and it seems to me that the concensus was moving towards WP:WSS (did it formally exist then?) being a better idea. TFD, methinks. --TheParanoidOne 09:54, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Rabbit season? STUB season! (WP:SFD)

I took the "proposed" tag off Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion and listed three stubs from WP:WSS/C there. The stubs and stub categories have been tagged properly, but I didn't yet list any of them on WP:TFD and WP:CFD as per our discussion on Wikipedia talk:Stub types for deletion. I have to go offline now, so if anyone could do this, I would be very grateful. Also, perhaps a final message on the Village Pump about this would be good?

P.S. I think it would be best if we would restrain ourselves for the moment, and not list more than, say, 5 stub types for deletion per week, until we get used to the process. -- grm_wnr Esc 16:50, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I've created Template:sfd-current - it'll be an easy way of keeping several stub, template and category related pages informed of what's going on. Grutness...wha? 00:29, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What is the current backlog of malformed, misnamed, orphaned, and otherwise unnecessary stubs that will eventually go through the SFD process? BlankVerse ∅ 15:19, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Isn't it the list on the Criteria page? --TheParanoidOne 16:24, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Yes and no. There are a lot of stubs listed on the Criteria page that will probably need looking at, espoecially in the "Newly-discovered stubs" section - there are also several given as examples on the Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Naming guidelines page. But there isn't one specific list that shows all the malformed names.In all I'd estimate there are 50 or so which need looking at, but there may be yet more I'm unaware of. Grutness...wha? 02:10, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
A reasonable start at looking at malformations in the redirect space can be found at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Stub_redirects where many of the "Transient redirects" are malformed. I'd started a set of explanations for the transients on Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Stub_redirects as an experiment, but I'm considering removing transients from the page and devoting it exclusively to permanents as transients would very likely end up on WP:SFD shortly after creation at some close future time. Courtland 10:16, 2005 Jun 17 (UTC)

Film director stubs

{{Film director stub}} looks suspiciously non-standard and is also named nonstandardly, without standard redirects.--MarSch 16:48, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That's one from our "found" list on WP:WSS/C that we didn't get around to fixing yet. I copied this post to WP:WSS/C#Film director stubs, and we should continue this discussion there. -- grm_wnr Esc 21:00, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Stub categories report

I'm finished adding links to the stub categories on WP:WSS/ST, and I found only three truly problematic ones - {{sikhi-stub}} (now on SFD), on which the category hadn't been created, {{Sydney suburb stub}}, which doesn't have one, and {{liberalparty-stub}}, which has two. On the other hand, stub category naming should really have some guidelines. For starters, the matter of "xx stubs" vs "xx-related stubs" vs. "xxian stubs" should be looked at. I don't propose fixing this in the near future, but it would be nice if we could add a section on category naming to Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Naming guidelines. Of course, we should discuss these guidelines here first. -- grm_wnr Esc 14:03, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Strangely, Template:Sydney suburb stub is listed on the [Category:Stubs] page, and one of Sydney suburb stubs, Oakhurst, Australia is listed there too, despite having been categorized. Conscious 12:21, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Yikes! User:Ta bu shi da yu added Category:Stubs to Template:Sydney suburb stub earlier today. Okay, so I'm going to give it a proper one before this categorization spreads around. -- grm_wnr Esc 13:48, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Mysteriously, Category:Sydney suburb stubs was speedied twice by TBSDY himself before (in September 2004). I'm going to ask him what's going on here before recreating it. -- grm_wnr Esc 13:52, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You beat me to that (Edit conflict - bah!) Houston (or at least, Wolloomooloo) we have a problem... until today, this did not have a category. Ta bu shi da yu must have noticed that this was a problem but (not being involved in WP:WSS) didn't quite get what should have been done right - he added Category:Stubs to it (a valiant attempt). Problem is, of course, that there are ovver 100 stubs with this template - and no category. BTW - you say there aren't many with category problems... there are still a lot from the "Stub-berg" which haven't been added to this list! I started to add them, but the job got the better of me. Grutness...wha? 13:58, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I know lots of those are problematic. My comment above is only aimed at the present, official list. By the way, I noticed you had a go at the {{liberalparty-stub}} category yourself, but were reverted (see Template talk:liberalparty-stub). What to do about this? -- grm_wnr Esc 15:11, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I didn't know that... I'll see if I can do something about it. Sigh. Grutness...wha? 01:21, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Btw, National Steel and Shipbuilding Company is also listed on Category:Stubs. Maybe water-stub is broken? Conscious 19:38, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Can't see any problem with either of the templates on it - odd. Grutness...wha? 01:21, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Ah...problem solved. Someone had put template {{stub}} and Category:Stubs on it. When it was subsorted the template was removed, but not the independent category listing. This was fixed by User:Cryptic an hour later. Grutness...wha? 01:21, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Categories without templates

What about the several stub categories that do not themselves have templates? I listed some of these a while ago at WP:WSS/ST in the header section "Stub categories without a stub template". I know there are some cases where the article-space categorization system does this, but it's nice to avoid if possible unless the number of subcategories at the next higher level is enormous, and I've not seen that as the case yet. Courtland 22:52, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC)

They're extraordinarily useful for the geo-stubs - and I think that's where most of them are located. If we possibly can I'd like to see them kept. Grutness...wha? 01:08, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Sounds ok ... utility is the driver afterall. My negativity on the matter comes from seeing a bad slice of the pie; looking at the various "state_media" categories, almost all of them are unpopulated with articles and have two or three sub-categories that are likewise un(der)populated by and large ... I'm an advocate of complicated shallow categorization as being more useful than simple deep categorization in general. Courtland 18:05, 2005 Jun 22 (UTC)
Makes sense - it's just more useful to put the US, Mexican, Canadian etc geo-stubs together in one parent category, and all the other parents are continent based. In the case of the Chinese ones, it's simply to avoid the likelihood of huge arguments (remember the Taiwan vs Republic of China debates...) Grutness...wha? 01:15, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Category naming guideline proposal

In my opinion, stubtype category names should mirror standard article category names when possible, but for the revision to end in "stubs" and correction to right grammer given this revision. For example Category:Art and Category:Art stubs follows this pattern, but Category:Canadian broadcasting and Category:Canada broadcasting stubs does not (but it should ... shame on me). In some cases this matching won't be possible, but these are very few and would bring into question either the appropriateness of the stub type or the appropropriateness of its scope. Courtland 22:47, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC)

Slight change in Africa-geo-stubs, and a call for help

  1. There has been a very minor change to the Africa geo-stubs. Up until now, all Indian Ocean island groups normally associated with Africa have been categorised as Southern Africa for the sake of geo-stub articles. The Seychelles have now been moved to East Africa, mainly because, well, they are east, and mostly far further north that any of the countries listed as southern Africa. Since this only currently affect four stubs, it is a very minor piece of fine-tuning.
  2. I'm about to break out two or three province-geo-stubs, as listed in the poposed split of Canada-geo-stub at WP:WSS/C. I'd be grateful for any help in populating the categories (a full list from a couple of weeks ago of what article belongs in each of the new categories can be found on one of my subpages at User:Grutness/Canada geo-stub list

Grutness...wha? 07:28, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Article template standardization

Now that the article talk page templates have been standardized a new effort has started up to standardize those templates that are found on the main article pages including stubs. I've left a message at Wikipedia talk:Template standardisation/article that I think that the issue of stub templates should remain with the WP:WSS. On the other hand, WP:WSS probably should do a better job of documenting what the current consensus for stub template design is. BlankVerse ∅ 28 June 2005 18:41 (UTC)

  • This could be a good time to look into Grutness' idea of making the font in stub templates smaller in size. As for a standard, the example contained within Wikipedia:Stub is the current standard, I guess. I'll wait for other editors to reply and see what happens. --Sn0wflake 28 June 2005 18:57 (UTC)
  • A couple of comments - first, stubs are unusual in that - unlike other templates - they're not designed to be obvious, so "less is better" is a good thing to keep in mind (have a look at {{Canberra suburb stub}} to see one that is not "less" enough!). Second, what's the story with 1.5 as far as icons are concerned? it would be nice to be able to get them back (and maybe have some limiting size - some of them, e.g., {{crater-stub}}, are pretty big!). Finally, I'm fairly easy-going as far as the look overall, but I still think the smaller text might work well. Grutness...wha? 29 June 2005 00:04 (UTC)

stubbers and stub-sorters

There may be people who are not interested in stub sorting and would only perform generic stubbing using only the tag, {{stub}}. Because there are so many stubs to choose from, it can be a barrier to complete the whole stubbing process. Therefore, it is adequate that one can just perform only one step of generic stubbing with its purpose of bringing attention to the newly discovered stub article. Thus there are two roles, stubbers and stub-sorters, whom work together to efficiently meet Wikipedia's stubbing goals. Comments? -- Zondor 2 July 2005 17:28 (UTC)

That's pretty much the way it works, but it's not particularly efficient. This process requires two stages rather than one. What tends to happen is that the creators of articles simply mark them with {{stub}}, or one of the coarser stub types like {{geo-stub}} or {{bio-stub}}, then stub-sorters come along and refine the stub type. It works, but it's not the ultimate heuristic. However, it can't be expected that everyone creating new articles will know all the stub types. It would be nice if everyone at least knew a few of the general coarser categories though. Grutness...wha? 2 July 2005 19:55 (UTC)
Reading through this again, I see I misunderstood your question. No, there is no such thing as a "stubber". People who write stub articles tend to mark them simply as stubs, although, as I pointed out above this isn't particularly efficient. If someone's going to go to the extent of looking for stubs to mark, then they're clearly interested in the stub sorting process to some extent at least. It tends to be for the most part that only stub sorters seek out older short articles to mark as stubs, and when they do that, they're quite likely to sort them further at the same time. In general using the standard {{stub}} template is discouraged, since it simply means that the work taken in marking the stub then has to be repeated by someone else later. For that reason, editors should be encouraged wherever possible to use a more specific stub template - even if it only a coarse level one such as {{bio-stub}}. Grutness...wha? 2 July 2005 23:46 (UTC)
Actually, at this point I think that using just 'stub' is more efficient than 'bio-stub', because at the rate we're going, a plain stub will get sorted much faster than a bio-stub, since there are still some fifteen thousand of the latter kind. --Joy [shallot] 3 July 2005 00:49 (UTC)
I do hope you are being sarcastic. If we encourage that kind of behavior, we will end up going back to six months ago, when we had a five digits amount of stubs on a myriad of subjects to sort. All that is being asked is that editors use the ten or so basic stubs categories to tag articles they create. That would be too much to ask if it was impossible to deduct the template name for most stubs, but it's quite the inverse. With all bio stubs in one place, the tagging possibilities become more limited, and thus much easier to be done. If we still had the same amount of members we had two months ago or so, bio-stub would already be almost dead. --Sn0wflake 3 July 2005 03:41 (UTC)
Putting a categorised stub-template onto an article is the same as doing a normal categorization. The people who do not categorize their articles (far too many in my opinion) are the same who would not put on a categorized stub template. In some but too few cases, it is obvious on the category page whether there is a corresponding or related stub category. One way to reduce the energy to conduct categorized stubbing is to work on making these category/stub-category associations a) ubiquitous across all stub types and b) obvious for all categories so effected. Courtland July 3, 2005 04:32 (UTC)

Actually what I see when new page patrolling is quite a lot of unstubbed stubs, the occasional cat stub and the very occasional stub-stub. I try to put as descriptive a stub on them as I can and leave further stubbing to the corresponding wikiproject or stub sorters. --MarSch 3 July 2005 17:13 (UTC)

It might be helpful to change the redlink screen so as to list a few basic stubs and encourage people to use them. --MarSch 3 July 2005 17:25 (UTC)

Stub threshold now works on category pages

Now that MediaWiki 1.5 is safely settled in on en.wikipedia, notice that your stub threshold preferences are used on category pages. Thus to simulate Category:Cities in New Zealand stubs. Simply set your stub threshold display to whatever your definition of a stub is, and visit Category:Cities in New Zealand. Pcb21| Pete 3 July 2005 16:51 (UTC)

  • That functionality just confuses things, or is it that this WikiProject is the one confusing things. The definition of stub used by MediaWiki is a mechanical one based on page size in bytes, not even lines or words or paragraphs. The definition we use here is a functional one based on what is considered "enough" for any particular article to be no longer a stub. By using manual attachment of stub templates to articles, each such article was looked at by a human being and judged to be a stub. What MediaWiki software should do is toggle on and off the viewing of articles that are labeled as stubs and drop the word "stub" for what is being defined by the byte size cutoff. Courtland July 3, 2005 22:23 (UTC)
    • I much prefer the mechanical definition because I can vary the bytes cut off point at will from one minute to the next. This change allows me to get a good feel for what the coverage is like in a particular category. The human definition, as given by this project, is, on the other hand, rigid and prone to mistakes. Of course people disagree with my perspective else this enormous project wouldn't have the momentum it has had. It is odd we have this huge project though, when the last I heard only 75% of articles were categorized at all! Pcb21| Pete 3 July 2005 23:02 (UTC)
  • Using a set page size for what is or isn't a stub clouds the issue of what a stub is. There is no way of accurately saying that a particular size of article is a stub or a full article.To use an example I've used before, a small village in England can have a full article in only two or three paragraphs - a capital city in Africa needs a considerably longer article. For that reason, the article Croughton, Northamptonshire is not a stub, whereas Kigali (a slightly longer page) is. By the size definition, an article with no text at all but with one large picture would not be a stub. It's a patently false idea that size is the only arbiter of what a stub is. Grutness...wha? 4 July 2005 01:21 (UTC)
I am not saying that size is the only arbiter. Of course articles have different natural lengths. This is why when I look at Category:Towns in Northamptonshire I might well set my stub threshold lower than when I look at Category:Capitals of African countries. This objection is always thrown up when I've mentioned this in the past, and when push comes to shove I've tended to find that the people making these claims about the usefulness of the automatic stub indicator have barely actually used it in anger and so have never actually experienced that the "problem" they fear isn't actually much of a problem at all. Pcb21| Pete 4 July 2005 07:28 (UTC)
p.s. Given that the stub flag is on the wikitext size, not the rendered page size, your point about pictures is incorrect. Pcb21| Pete 4 July 2005 07:28 (UTC)
OK - sorry for that assumption. And you're right - I haven't used the automatic stub indicator, but consider, for example, a category like "Cities and towns in New Zealand". Towns with 1000 people and a million-person city like Auckland sit alongside each other. So what size threshold do you use? Also consider that many short articles are in more than one category, and therefore it is not only possible but extremely likely that setting different lengths for different categories will result in a lot of articles being listed as stubs if considered in light of one of their categories, but not if considered as part of their other categories. Are these stubs or not? Or some weird hybrid? Grutness...wha? 4 July 2005 09:54 (UTC)
I agree that the automatic mechanism is not perfect for the reasons you state. The thrust of my point is that they are useful in spite of their imperfections and that day-to-day use of them bears this out. Hence my opinion is that categorization bears more fruit than stub-categorization. Given that the two pieces of labour are much, it makes sense to make to concentrate on the former initially. Obviously I can't force people to work on anything in particular, but felt it important that I try to get across why I have this view. Pcb21| Pete 4 July 2005 10:39 (UTC)
I think you miss one point in this last comment. Stub categorization is categorization. Further, we do have within the guidelines (I think this was added) that no article should have a stub category and not have a "normal" category; any time that someone finds an article with a stub category that does not have a "normal" category should, at the very least, add the article to the normal category that is the parent of the stub category (that's my operating model at least). Courtland July 4, 2005 12:30 (UTC)

Which new articles to stub?

Currently I stub every new article that is not wikified. This doesn't seem to be the rule though. So I guess I could use some feedback on my philosophy, which is that WikiProjects need to know about new articles created on their subject. They are the most capable of and interested in, doing basic wikification and copyediting (the distinction is not very useful I think), categorization, expanding or merging into existing articles. But to do all this they need to be made aware of the new articles. If not with stubs then how should this be accomplished. The reason I bring this up is that there is a stubsensor project which removes stubs from long articles. Some of these articles have only a handful of edits and are uncategorized. I would categorize these longer articles myself, but for that I would need to learn another bunch of names.--MarSch 3 July 2005 17:23 (UTC)

  • The consensus defintion of a stub article is contained in Wikipedia:Stub and states
A stub is an article which is clearly too short, but not so short as to be useless.
In general, it must be long enough to at least define the article's title.
This usually means 3 to 10 short sentences.
Note that a longer article may be a stub if the topic is complex enough;
conversely, a short article on a topic which has a very narrow scope may not be a stub.
I personally don't agree with this guideline, and therefore will not add a stub-template to an article that does not have one, nor will I remove all stub-templates from any article that is so labeled ... unless in either case I am a significant contributor to the article. Courtland July 3, 2005 22:34 (UTC)

I don't agree wth it either, and remove the stub template from long unwikified articles. These shouldn't have {{stub}} - they're not stubs. There's a perfectly good template especially for them - {{wikify}} - and this alerts a separate WikiProject (Wikipedia: WikiProject Wikification). They're not really WP:WSS's concern. Grutness...wha? 4 July 2005 01:32 (UTC)

Regarding the size guideline for stubs... screw it, then. Let's start a poll or something along those lines and define a new standard. It would have been great if you guys had forwarded these concerns back when we were discussing this for a month, but hey, Wikipedia is not paper and this is not a Policy, so we can always make changes. Suggestions? --Sn0wflake 4 July 2005 02:36 (UTC)
Suggestions? How about letting the project know when this sort of thing is being discussed? Where has it been discussed for a month? If you mean here, then note that very similar concerns about using length as a criterion are listed further up this very page, and by the same people. Grutness...wha? 4 July 2005 06:03 (UTC)
Remember the Centralisation project? That size definition has been around ever since the second draft, the one made by Grm. I changed the original which was from 2 to 10 to from 3 to 10 and since nobody seemed to have an objection against it, it made it to the guideline page. Now, it seems that this discussion is going in circles, since nobody has actually forwarded a tangible definition that we can use for the guideline page. The definition is already hazy enough, we can't possibly hope that "wether an article is a stub or not depends on how much of the total information avaliable on the subject is contained within the article" will do. So I'm not being sarcastic here. I am sincerely asking if somebody can give a better definition for stubs, one that doesn't rely on subjectivity. --Sn0wflake 4 July 2005 15:00 (UTC)
I remember the centralisation project and I remember my not agreeing with the consensus and deciding that it was more important to reach a consensus than to bury my axe in the discussion on this point. Even though I don't agree with the consensus doesn't mean the consensus is wrong; note that I choose not to act in an area where this particular consensus touches, and there's plenty of other places to act without feeling put out that I didn't get my way in all things. The point of all this is that I should have just stated what the answer to the original question was without injecting my personal views into it, which should have been my role as an "ambassador" for the Project addressing MarSch's question. So is there an answer that we as a Project can articulate that is useful? Should we say that the boxed text is the current consensus as to the definition of a stub article and that this isn't agreed to by everyone, but that the Project participants try to abide by the consensus without feeling wholly bound by it? That sounds fair, doesn't it? Courtland July 4, 2005 17:40 (UTC)
This did get quite off-topic, and yes, your conclusion is likely the best answer for this question. --Sn0wflake 4 July 2005 17:59 (UTC)
I tend to mark an article I create as a stub unless I believe I know (and have written) pretty much everything there is to know on the subject. I mark an article I read as a stub iff it does not have the information I'm looking for. I recently edited a short article (Glossop, South Australia) and created another (Fua'amotu International Airport) which were quickly tagged as stubs by other people - the latter even had two new categories created by another person to put it in! This seemed overkill when the parent category I had used only had 18 articles. --ScottDavis 4 July 2005 07:08 (UTC)
You want to use stub iff it is incomplete (doesn't have the information you are looking for). I want to use stub if the current text is a short place-holder for a real article. Yet we use the same keyword. This will clearly create a variation in definition of coverage (not matter how hard you try to define from the top-down what a stub is. And people complain about the cost-free auto-stub marking! :-/. Pcb21| Pete 4 July 2005 07:35 (UTC)
But of course. Take a look at what you just wrote. To paraphrase: you have a definition of what a stub is, but WSS actually uses another. Then you are surprised when a mechanism that finds your definition of stubs (but not the one actually used) doesn't interest us. Think about it. Grutness...wha? 4 July 2005 14:34 (UTC)
Sorry bad wording on my part (I was meaning "me" as a member of the project rather than the "me" of the section above! My point was that WSS won't have a single definition of a stub across its spectrum of particpants. Hence the variation in what a stub tag means across the project. Hence a stub tag is not perfect in the same way an auto-marking is not perfect.
I have thought about the issue. I have seen the colossal organisational effort going on here. In a sense I think we are too far down the road of WSS to suggest something else. People have invested so much time in the "remove {{stub}}" mentality that bringing up the question its value is always going to get a frosty reception. Pcb21| Pete 4 July 2005 15:59 (UTC)
Wow, a lower size limit. What about those articles that are only 3 words? Or 1 sentence? --MarSch 4 July 2005 14:50 (UTC)
OK, let's get this discussion directed down one path at a time. There are three threads interwoven here, and they are indeed separable
  1. Is there a mechanical "# words" limit that can be used to effectively define a stub article?
  2. Is there a lower "# words" limit below which an article isn't even a stub but something less?
  3. Is there value in categorizing stubs so that all articles that meet the stub-article definition are not labeled identically?
Yes, there are lots of other questions, but try to teeze them out because not everything is so intertwined as to make consensus and compromise impossible .. and compromise is an essential part of consensus when you have as varied a bunch of authors as are under this roof.
Courtland July 4, 2005 17:32 (UTC)
1) As I see it, yes. There is a more or less stablished number of words, or rather, sentences, that define a stub. The current definition might be wrong in the sense that I have already seen fairly complete articles with 10 sentences. 10 long senteces, mind you, but 10 nevertheless. I am of the opinion that the current definition is fairly correct, but would agree with changes. 2) No. I believe that it is agreed upon that substubs did not benefit the project as a whole, and that articles containing one generic sentences are not "small stubs", but rather speedy deletion candidates. 3) I cannot answer from a neutral point-of-view, as my participation in this project is significantly motivated by a desire for organization, rather than practical use. --Sn0wflake 4 July 2005 18:10 (UTC)
I wonder whether a compromise definition would work, at least for finding stubs, even if not for automatically categorising them. At its barest bones it would boil down to this "All articled below length n are stubs; a small proportion of articles above length n are also stubs". From that point it's "simply" a case of defining n and which larger articles are stubs. Grutness...wha? 5 July 2005 00:44 (UTC)
(Responding to Sn0flake's remark) Interesting - I read the questions and thought 1) No 2) Yes, 3) Huh?.
To explain - I broadly agree with the definition in the box (with personal emphasis on in general, usually and may). Small subjects may still be encyclopædic with a complete article of less than ten sentences, that still more naturally belongs to its own article, not as part of some larger article. A one or two-sentence article is more likely to be appropriate as a wictionary article than useful as a "placeholder" if the author couldn't write more than that on the subject. --ScottDavis 5 July 2005 01:59 (UTC)
(Responding to Grutness' remark) I use the threshold preference set at 800 bytes. I doubt anything smaller than that could be considered not a stub. --ScottDavis 5 July 2005 01:59 (UTC)

I had a go at Wikipedia:Stubs and tried to make it more complete and eliminate some cruft. I also removed this paragraph:

"In the past, a category referred to as substubs was utilised for articles smaller than the proposed minimum stub size, but this category has been deprecated with time. It is important to remember that the Wikipedia is not a dictionary; that is why the Wiktionary exists. If your article is too short to be a stub, consider moving it to said sister project or - even better - with a small amount of research, create a useful stub. Take this into consideration before submitting short entries with barely any information."

I find it rather pointless, do any of you object? --Sn0wflake 5 July 2005 04:09 (UTC)

It does seem a little pointless, yes - and the less that substubs are mentioned, the better, probably. Then again, some comment on tiny articles is probably still needed. What about this?:
"Small articles with little information, or only a definition, may end up being nominated for deletion. Wikipedia is not a dictionary, but it has a partner project (Wiktionary) which is. If your article is very short, consider either moving it to Wiktionary or - even better - adding more information to it."
On the subject of article length, I note that no-one has mentioned one type of article that is always a problem when judging stubs by length alone - a paragraph followed by a list. An article which says: "Foo is a type of flubby - the following are some types of foo..." may be quite a long article, but still have so much information missing that it is a stub (I'm not referring to pure and simple lists, but rather things that should have information as well as a list). Grutness...wha? 5 July 2005 11:06 (UTC)

WikiProject Templates

WikiProject Templates was created awhile ago, but nobody has done anything with it. It was then nominated at WP:VFD for deletion on May 18, 2005, but appears to have fallen through the cracks. In the next few days I am going to try to turn the currently empty and unused Templates WikiProject into a working WIkiProject. Until I do that, could a few editors visit Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/WikiProject Templates and add a few more Keep votes? TIA BlankVerse ∅ 4 July 2005 18:13 (UTC)

  • Radiant! really stepped over the line on this one as far as I'm concerned. Pisses me off to see this kind of behavior. Courtland July 4, 2005 21:42 (UTC)

Stubsensor becoming a subproject of this one

After getting some Stubsensor cleanup projects under my belt I would like to move it to being a proper Wikiproject. As such I believe it makes the most sense to make it a subproject of this one. Does anyone see a problem with this or have objections? I believe the projects would complement each other well and the Stubsensor project can definitely make use of your stub criteria and policies. I've also noticed that quite a few volunteers for the Stubsensor project are also stub sorters. Triddle 19:27, July 9, 2005 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay, Triddle. It seems that at times we have slight hierarchical problems within the project... but that's actually a good thing, so who cares. :) Anyway, I believe most of the project's members find your Stubsensor to be a good tool and would not oppose on any level to the parenting of the projects. So take my "yes" as a "general yes". Of course, if a member opposes to this individually in the future, you will have to carry a discussion with him, but for all purposes, go on. This should not be a problem. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 18:07, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
I second that. As someone who has worked on the Stubsensor project and with general stub categorising, I think they are quite compatible. mennonot 19:16, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Use of {{WPSS-cat}}

I uderstood that this template should be applied to approved stub categories, to indacate that future chnages should be made thorugh the /criteria mechanism. Si i added a mention of it to WP:STUB in the instuctions for creating new stub catefories. User:Sn0wflake reverted this, with the edit summary: User:DESiegel, I believe you are missing the point of that template somewhat. Would you mind taking creating a discussion at WP:WSS first?. I am creating the discussion as requested. If the point of the template is not as I have suggested above, what exactly is the point, and how is it to be used. I thought I was doing obvious maintence work after seeing the brief discuission over creating this template, and looking at the tempalte itself. What did I miss? Look at the edit history on WP:STUB, and particularly this version to see what I said. Note that I did this change twice, but not as an attempt at a revert war -- I incorrectly thought that my change had been wiped out in the course of repairs to vandalism -- i didn't look at the history closely enough. But that is a minor point, the question is, should this template tag be used on all "approved" stub categories? If not, how and were is it supposed to be used? DES 22:47, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

DES, it seems that the implementation of this information on the guideline page should have been a little different, but your general idea is correct. The wording I propose is something along these lines: "The addition of the {{WPSS-cat}} template should be made once your stub category is approved by the WP:WSS, to make clear that it underwent the mandatory revision proccess and was approved by means of consensus." and that this paragraph is not placed on the A,B,C list, since that is directly connected to the green box above it, and it would not make a lot of sense to contain a different letter which does not appear there. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 01:23, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
I created the template in an attempt to slow the proliferation of new templates and categories. The template should be used on categories that have been approved by WP:WSS and are currently on the stub type list, but which are likely to attract new splits from people not involved with the project (such as bio-stub, geo-stub, hist-stub and the like). It can theoretically be used on all stub categories that we want to keep, so the edit to WP:Stub was OK, but could do with rewording as Sn0wflake says above. BTW, I'll post a little of this at template talk:WPWSS-cat, as well. Grutness...wha? 01:39, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
Note that the instructions tell people they shouldn't even REACH the green box unless they have alredy gone through the week on WP:WSS, and seem -- to me at least -- to imply that no stub category should be created without going through WP:WSS first'. In any case, however this is worded and whereever in the instructions it is placed, I think it should be on the same page that tells people how to create the stub cat, and i think it should at least strongly suggest using {{WPSS-cat}} on all new stub categories created via the proper process, as there is no knowing for sure in advance where splits may come. DES 01:48, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, we are implying that all stub categories should undergo revision by the WP:WSS before they are created. Anyway, the one that knows best what should be done with this template is Grutness and I am willing to leave this matter on his hands, now that all opinions have been put forward. --Sn0wflake 02:55, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

"Stubs to be discussed" on {{newstubs}}

The {{newstubs}} template used at the top of the Criteria page states:

All such articles should be placed in the Category "Stubs to be discussed".

This category is empty. Has it ever been used? What is its purpose? When/why was this line added to the template?

The line itself is also misleading as it taks about articles whereas the template itself is talking about stubs. --TheParanoidOne 17:23, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

I don't think it's ever been used. Might be better to change the template to make it similar to {{WPSS-cat}}, and make it clear that proposals for stubs should be at WP:WSS/C rather than in Category:Stubs to be discussed Grutness...wha? 09:18, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
I've changed it - I've also moved it to {{WPSS-new}} and removed the category from it, since there was never any point for it anyway. The question is, does the deprecated category go to sfd or cfd? Grutness...wha? 11:14, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
I suppose it could go either way, but seeing as the other category on it is WSS and it relates to WSS (more or less), probably SFD. --TheParanoidOne 19:52, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
I'll try sfd first. Grutness...wha? 01:57, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

General issue

Hello, I'm a user of the Germanspeaking Wikipedia. It is now being discussed wheather a stub categorisation is useful or not. Do you have any ideas? Is your system successful? Thanks, Scriberius 05:07, July 28, 2005 (UTC)

I think it's a good idea (obviously, or I wouldn't be reading this page anyway). It seems to work reasonably well in some areas, not so well in others. My $0.02: Allow them only for topics which have a WikiProject attached at first, and build them categorically from the ground up. The biggest problem we have here is the unchecked proliferation of minor stub types. On the other hand, reading the discussions, if you push this through you're heading for massive drama. Maybe it isn't worth it on your side. -- grm_wnr Esc 08:09, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
My 2c-worth agrees that it is a good idea, but very time and energy consuming, so you might want to think long and hard about it before you start. It's also good to lay out a few guidelines before you start. If we could start all over again with stub categorisation, I'd do what I could to make sure that template and category names were standardised, and the stub categories followed a similar hierarchy to the main categories. Also try to make it clear from the start that stub categories shouldn't just be created without going through some kind of debating process first. I think we spend more time trying to sort out the new categories that have been casually made than we do actually sorting the stubs themselves! Grutness...wha? 09:12, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
It's a tiresome job, but nevertheless, there are definitely times when you see your work pay off. If you and the supporters of the project don't have quite a bit of patience, I wouldn't suggest taking this forward. There are times when this project becomes really frustrating. We had Category:Stubs empty just a few days ago, and out of nowehere, many, many articles appeared, so there I went and catgorized 150 damn stubs; somebody was helping out and he or she cleared about a hundred others. People (as in "the general community") never quite adapt, even though the amount of stubs which arrive daily is small enough to be kept at bay. The editors who are truly commited to this project have become borderline insane (*rises hand, points fingers at above posters*), so... tread carefully. :) --Sn0wflake 12:33, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
I can't add much to the opinions above, but I think it's worth the while; the goal, obviously, is to get the stub-article to the people that may say something about, and if you keep watch of the pages you moved to a certain stub-category, you can watch them grow (o.k., only sometimes, and then only sloooowly :) ). Also, it adds a certain structure to the whole thing. Being a german user myself (although almost exclusively active in the english wiki, don't ask me why), I might also add that imho the german wiki has grown large enough to be needing it by now Lectonar 13:12, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Thanks, you guys - ...We'll give it a try...! Scriberius 23:12, July 28, 2005 (UTC) aka Matt1971


Suggestion for UTC pages listed as Stubs at Category:Stubs

Suggest removal of stubs category from all the UTC pages listed on Category:Stubs - they are really just linked redirection pages. Scottkeir 04:41, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

Agreed, I was considering bringing this up myself. Theres no suitable category for them (that I can think of), and they seem to be as complete as possible anyway.M A Mason 20:38, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Be bold if you must, but don't forget to add an HTML comment stating that the stub tag has been removed and the reason for its removal, or it will be tagged back. At the end of this message I'm posting a sample HTML comment in case you guys don't know how to make one. Just check the source to get it. --Sn0wflake 21:10, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Well I went boldly ahead, removed the tags and left a message. Took long enough! Thanks for the info on HTML messages, I knew there was some way of doing it, wasnt quite sure how though. M A Mason 22:43, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Never a problem, helping new project members is always rewarding. As a side-note, remeber that while we are keeping Category:Stubs at bay, our real focus is on trying to kill the monster we like to call Category:People stubs. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 23:10, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for your help - especially as I hardly had to lift a finger! Forgive the newbie question, but are HTML comments better than adding a comment to the discussion page for an entry? Now, off to try and help slay that dragon... Scottkeir 16:11, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
It depends. It is generally accepted that HTML comments are useful in case you are trying to avoid constant reversion of an article. Try editing Scorpions (band), for example, to see what I mean. However, you should use them sparingly, and always try to solve arguments by means of consensus. A HTML comment is worth nothing if other editors do not agree with its contents. If you need help on anything else, feel free to contact me by means of my Talk page. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 16:25, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

The musician stubs job - Unsure

Someone, maybe a WSS participant decided to start Template:Musician-stubs recently, putting them into more specific categories. Was there any discussion on this? It is now very confusing, and potentially an issue when placing people into this.

For example, there are guitarist and singer categories. Where would I put a singer who plays the guitar? Or a musician who plays all the instruments, and isn't notable for any specifically? Or a composer who is also a singer? Whilst avoiding multi-stubbing articles, this is very difficult.

I think the stub types and categories aren't specific enough at the moment, and the music stubs in general are infact very unspecific and unsorted. The fact someone created finnish-musician-stub just complicates things further. Hedley 01:45, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

As the creator of bassist/drummer/guitarist-stub, I might as well try to answer your questions. I have been using a rule of thumb to decide in which stub category to place multi-instrumentists which goes a bit like "what is this person most notable for?" and this question generally has a clear answer. When the answer is ambiguous, using two stub categories is not that much of a hassle. The whole concept is still very new, but it is working out fairly well up to this point in time. Nevertheless, what do you propose? "Guitarist-singer-composer-stub" does not seem very realistic. --Sn0wflake 01:57, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
I'm unsure what I propose. I think Finnish-musician-stub is, however, a bad and un-needed idea. To most people, placement of musician stubs has been made a lot harder; I only found out about these changes today. I personally think some of the stub categories weren't needed at this time. Hedley 02:29, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Hm... really, you can be open about your opinions. Say what you think should be re-evaluated and we'll try to reach a consensus. As for "Finnish-musician-stub", why don't you take it to SFD? --Sn0wflake 02:37, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
"I personally think some of the stub categories weren't needed at this time." Given that Category:Musician stubs is now at 21 pages (with the new finer granularity stub types), I would disagree.
"I think Finnish-musician-stub is, however, a bad and un-needed idea.". {{finnish-musician-stub}} doesn't exist, so what exactly is your point about that? --TheParanoidOne 05:36, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Sorry, I meant Template:Finland-musician-stub. Hedley 18:15, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
In that case I would have to agree with you that that particular stub type is not very useful. It is not one of the "official" musician-stub subtypes. These are noted on the stub types list as well as Category:Musician stubs. Thanks for pointing out {{Finland-musician-stub}}. I have added it to the "Newly discovered ..." list here. --TheParanoidOne 21:26, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

The fate of /Criteria, and a template

WikiProject Stub sorting
Information
Project page talk
- Stub types (sections) talk
- Stub types (full list) talk
- To do talk
- Naming conventions talk
- Redirects category talk
Wikipedia:Stub talk
Discussion
Proposals (A) talk
- Current month
Discussion talk
Criteria (A) (discontinued) talk
Deletion (Log) (discontinued) talk
Category

I have a plan (breaking up /Criteria into various smaller pages), stated in detail on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria#Breaking up the page. Please comment there and tell me if it's a good idea or not. -- grm_wnr Esc 18:31, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Also, I have created the little table to the right. If the splitting of /Criteria goes ahead, we definitely need it, if not, it's still somewhat useful. I'd move it to {{WSS}}, what do you think? -- grm_wnr Esc 21:08, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

Hey, Grm. I agree with the split and find the idea of the project box quite useful. In other words, as far as I'm concerned you can go ahead. --Sn0wflake 21:34, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Not sure about breaking up the criteria page, but the project box looks very useful. Grutness...wha? 01:18, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Very unhappy with over promotion of stub-categories

I am very unhappy that the automatic code or whatever it is called for stub categories is putting the stub category at the head of the category, eg in category:France. I think this is an inappropriate promotion of a subcategory which tends to contain articles of low average importance. It is only relevant to the probably tiny fraction of users who actively look for stubs to work on, and is a distraction for the rest of us. I think stub categories should be under S for Stub.

Is there a simple way to change the code to do this? Can it be done globally for the "code" (ie. the ((Stub Category|article=sports|newstub=sport-stub|category=sports)) thing)? - I've had to use round brackets to get this example out of the sports category.

Perhaps there has already been discussion of this, but if it was only carried out between stubbing enthusiasts, it will have been grossly biased in favour of placing great (and in my view excessive) emphasis on stubs. I really don't think that making stubs the top priority among a group of subcategories is appropriate at all. It demotes good categories, draws attention to poor content when there is plenty of good content to enthuse people about Wikipedia, and I doubt that it even works. Please consider changing this as users are not all stubbing enthusiasts, and I really don't want to have the stub categories shoved under my nose like this. CalJW 00:04, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

  • I didn't think the last time I'd looked at the boilerplate it forced the stub category to a position of emphasis. I did a bit of looking and see that on July 10 User:Docu added the "*" to the sort key for {{Stub category}}; this was the last edit to the template. Because the template cited above is a meta-template (I believe), it also received the indexing term from {{Stub category}} and presented it through {{Regional stub category}}. I have reverted the edit by User:Docu pending discussion ... or pending someone telling me that I should read discussions before taking drastic actions :) (I've not been active here for a while, but the -:(- post caught my eye). If there has not been discussion, then perhaps that should start now. Courtland 01:35, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
  • I'd agree that the stub category shouldn't have the priority at the head of the list of categories. it makes sense if it was done by a metatemplate... I'd wondered if there was something that could be done about it. Grutness...wha? 03:43, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Agree that there is no reason forcing it to the top. But forcing it to "S" is not so ideal as well... Is there a way of forcing it to the bottom? -- grm_wnr Esc 13:06, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Forcing to the bottom

It could be forced to the end of the alphabet by replacing * with "ZZZZZZ", but really it doesn't belong with regular categories at all. Ideally I think it would be in a separate section, maybe there is a symbol that would look right and also be sorted after Z. Kappa 13:25, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

  • Maybe an accented character, or something from another alphabet? But that wouldn't make much sense. I think ultimately, S (Stubs) makes more sense, no matter how you look at it. Circeus 14:48, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
  • I think that lower-case letters are sorted after uppercase in category and article lists; unlike titles, category indexing terms are not restricted to uppercase-starts. Thus, using the indexing term "stubs" might be of use (as opposed to "Stubs"). Another alternative would be to use another character that sorts after the main alphabetical ones for indexing. For instance, looking at ASCII suggests "~" or "|" as options from the core ASCII character set, that the indexing term might be set to "~Stubs" or merely "~s" (I don't think that "~" bare and alone would be good ... just a gut feeling without data support). Thoughts on those options? Courtland 16:47, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
  • It's possibly a bug in the software, but there is one argument for moving all subcategories to the top: At the moment, the software sorts all the members of a catagory - both articles and subcategories - then displays the first 200 of them, with the subcats displayed separately from the articles. If a subcategory sort key is late in the alphabet and in a category with over 200 articles, the subcat may not appear on the first page of the parent. I don't know if this is ever an issue other than within major stub categories themselves. I suspect this is an issue that needs some flexibility depending on number of articles and number of other subcategories. --ScottDavis | Talk 00:28, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
    • this is frequently an issue with stub categories that are sub-categories of stub categories, but infrequently a problem with categories in the "normal" article space. In the stub-world we've tried to advocate a 2-page-or-less optimum for stub categories (if memory serves); in the full-article-world the vast majority of categories are 1-page (does anyone have a histogram of article counts across categories to share?). Courtland 02:57, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
  • I like the lower case suggestion - another possibility would be using Ø, which I see used occasionally to signify null-edits. Since stub templates and categories don't add anything to the articles but rather are editors' tools, they could be considered in that context. Grutness...wha? 01:06, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Another project for the crew

Alright, here's another project for any willing individuals: edit the various stub templates and add <span class="plainlinks">...</span> around the template to remove the annoying external link graphics. I've already done this at Template:Stub. -- BRIAN0918  03:44, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

new template for categories

To match the {{ttl}} template for templates that User:Grutness created, I've created the {{cat-c}} template for categories. For example, For Category:California, if you type {{cat-c|California}}, it turns into Category:California (t, l), where "t" is a link to the category's Talk page, and "l" is for "What links here". BlankVerse ∅ 01:54, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps you could document (here and on its Talk page) when this should be used. Before it appears on the bottom of every California-entertainment-related-geo-stub. (SEWilco 03:18, 11 August 2005 (UTC))
It does look useful, though. I'd suggest mentioning it on Wikipedia talk:Categories for deletion, too (I should do the same on tfd with the one I created!). Grutness...wha? 06:50, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
Well, then I'll mention {{cl}} here too, which I created recently - it' basically {{tl}} for Categories. {{cl|California}}, it turns into Category:California. I tried to think of a way to make it clear that it's a category, but I coouldn't come up with anything useful like the template brackets of {{tl}}. -- grm_wnr Esc 08:55, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
how about ((double parentheses?)). Grutness...wha? 09:32, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
How about "Cat:"? DES (talk) 12:31, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, that would work - or simply "C:". Grutness...wha? 01:21, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
As you can see above, I implemented "Cat:". Change it if you don't like it. DES (talk) 13:30, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
Looks good - fine by me as Cat. Grutness...wha? 14:29, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
I repeat my request for documentation of when this should be used. Somehow I think it is not intended to be used at the bottom of articles to indicate membership in a Category. (SEWilco 15:09, 12 August 2005 (UTC))
I think it should be used when a categoty is being discussed, or mentioned rather than used. Category:Foo is shorthand for Category:Foo just as {{Foo}} is shorthand for Template:Foo. On SfD or CfD such mentions would be common. Or someone on a talk page might say "I think this article belongs in Category:Foo rather than Category:Bar, does anyone disagree? if not I'll change it." That is the reason for this template, i should think. (see Use-mention distinction.)DES (talk) 15:17, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
As I implied before, I think this will be of most use in places like the cfd and sfd pages, where categories are frequently referred to rather than being called up to categorise the pages they're mentioned on. BTW, I hope no-one minds, but I added a space after the colon on the template: Cat: Foo just looked a little neater to me that Cat:Foo. If there are any objections, feel free to revert. Grutness...wha? 13:05, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
If we're going to say "Cat:", why not go the whole way and say "Category:"? That way it is 100% clear what is meant. (And the amount of space saved with the abbreviation is pretty insignificant.) -Aranel ("Sarah") 18:44, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
It does add up, though. I could see this new template being used on {{sfd-current}}, and there any space is at a premium. I think we could get away with using C: or Cat: on there, but Category: would be too long. I don't think many people would be confused by the meaning of "Cat:" (unless the name of the category was something like "Tabby"). Grutness...wha? 01:02, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Section "stubs"

After discovering the first topical section-stub (see here), I've been thinking: Is a section "stub" a stub anyway? WP:STUB doesn't mention them. We only care about them because they happen to be called stubs, but otherwise they are something different entirely. I propose removing {{sectstub}} and {{sect-num-stub}} from WP:WSS/ST, renaming them in line with {{expandsect}} (which is redundant right now anyway) and declare that short sections are beyond the scope of the WP:WSS. And we should rename any other section "stub" templates that turn up in the future. We have enough problems already wirth regular stubs. -- grm_wnr Esc 17:50, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

See my comments under the discovery. IMO this field could be so big that it would need a completely separate wikiproject for sectstubs, organised in parallel with the stub sorting project. I don't no about you, but I haven't the energy or time to go there. Grutness...wha? 01:09, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Alternate stub criterion

I have proposed text, at Wikipedia talk:Stub#Proposed "depth of coverage" standard to try to captue in words the notion thaqt what a stub is cannot be solely defined by a mere mechanical counting of words, sentances, or paragraphs. Please visit and comment. DES (talk) 14:10, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Naming conventions

Hi all - I've added a note on standard stub template and category naming guidelines at Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Stub templates and categories. I'd appreciate it if people could have a look and consider improving what I've written if they see fit. Note that I've added it under the "formalised conventions" rather than "conventions under debate" section, mainly because, while it is not totally formalised, it is widely accepted across WP:WSS. Grutness...wha? 01:45, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Maintenance collaboration of the week

The maintenance collaboration for Sep 4–Sep 10 is stub sorting.
Put on your sorting hat and dig right into Category:People stubs!

The above added to Category:People stubs. I have no idea what that means, but if it means we get help with the mountainous people stubs, all the better. --TheParanoidOne 19:40, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

As long as we don't end up with 100 newly created stub types because of it... Grutness...wha? 01:41, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
It's a box that appears in various places - principally at the top of the Community Portal. With luck, it means that any bored editors will decide to sort a few of the people stubs. The collaboration topic changes from week to week: I would expect stub sorting to be there every couple of months. Bluap 09:30, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Is bridge considered a sport?

I was going through the People stubs category, and came across an article about Rixi Markus, a British bridge player. Would it be best to categorize it as a sports stub or something else? I don't know whether bridge really qualifies as a sport. --David Wahler (talk) 19:40, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

I would say bridge isn't a sport, as it doesn't require physical activity (which is also what Sport says as far as the definition of a sport). Which unfortunately means there isn't a good place to put the person. Perhaps we need a game-bio-stub to cover that (as there's also a decent number of articles on poker players). For now I'd say {{UK-bio-stub}} and {{card-game-stub}} would be best. --Mairi 19:54, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
OK, thanks! --David Wahler (talk) 20:13, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
Depends on what you consider to be a sport. The World Bridge Federation is recognized as a sports federation by the International Olympic Committee and the WBF has been trying to get duplicate bridge into the Olympic Games for quite some time. Caerwine 23:54, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
True; it is hardly clear. But as far as stub sorting, I think (altho I could be completely wrong) that people who would be editing articles on, say, rugby players (or other things in sportbio-stub) wouldn't be that likely to edit articles on bridge players. Also, at present {{chess-bio-stub}} isn't a child of {{sportbio-stub}}. --Mairi 00:21, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

A proposal re:Sectstubs

Over at SFD there is currently a sectstub specific to pokemon articles, and the general vote seems to have been a non-vote - abstaining on the grounds that while not being useful to us as stub sorters it is useful to the Pokemon wikiproject.For this reason, and also given the likelihood that more of these things will start to appear eventually, I'd like to propose the following. Please make any suggestions and amendments you think are needed - this is very much one person's rough draft.

Specialised sectstubs are largely beyond the scope of WP:WSS. They are not sorted by WP:WSS or given specialist sectstub types by WP:WSS. Their similarity to stubs, however, means that WP:WSS is likely to come into contact with them, and as such suggests the following guidelines:

  • Specialist sectstubs should only be created for use by WikiProjects. Any specialist sectstub that is unconnected with a WikiProject should be nominated for deletion at SFD.
  • WikiProjects may create their own specialist sectstubs without first proposing them at WP:WSS. Deletion of any no longer required should be done through SFD.
  • All such sectstubs should remain specific to individual WikiProjects - a specific sectstub should not be shared by several projects.
  • Specialist sectstubs should, where possible, conform to a set style as laid out at Wikipedia: Stub and sectstub templates for WikiProjects (I think making this page would be useful anyway, given the number of times WikiProjects create their own stub types without telling us!).

Any thoughts? Suggestions? Grutness...wha? 04:25, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

That generally sounds good. Specialized sectstubs ought to be listed on WP:WSS/ST (or elsewhere), tho, so that people not in the WikiProject the template is for will still know about it. And a seperate page regarding WikiProjects might be useful, but Wikipedia:Stub already mentions this project repeatedly, and that doesn't get the WikiProjects to tell us. --Mairi 05:09, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
I'd be for it under the following conditions: 1) The template is shoved as a subpage of the WikiProject. 2) The template does not use any categories. Being that it is under the first rule, such a template, despite being a stub, is specifically a template of the WikiProject and has nothing to do with the Stub sorting WikiProject. Therefore, we should not be maintaining any listing of specialized section stubs, nor are we responsible for deleting them. --AllyUnion (talk) 05:33, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
A lot of wikiprojects (including this one) have a category of pages related to them. I wouldn't mind if thea project's sectstubs led to a subcategory of a wikiproject category, but other than that, yes, there probably shouldn't be categories. Whatlinkshere can always be used to find pages that need fixing. Grutness...wha? 08:14, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
I agree with AllyUnions on the count of categories. There's no need for a category: what links here is fine. However, I don't understand why having it as a subpage of the WikiProject be necessary? --Celestianpower hablamé 09:33, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
Templates under a WikiProject's space (subpage) is usually maintained by a WikiProject. They don't need to be collapsed into a list somewhere, as primarily the only people using the sectstub specifically related to a subject is the WikiProject related to that subject. --AllyUnion (talk) 02:46, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
For reference, there's currently 7 pages worth of sectstubs, altho that number could grow alot if individual WikiProjects had templates. --Mairi 06:09, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

I've noticed that {{UK-tv-stub}} has a Category tag for Category:Television stubs, as well as the specific Category:United Kingdom television programme stubs. It seems that a template should only contain the Category tag for the stub Category associated with it, not the larger category (Television stubs in this case), as otherwise using the more specific tag doesn't help empty out the more general one. Is that how things work? Silverfish 23:09, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Indeed. I have removed the category from the template. --TheParanoidOne 05:18, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Bio-stub

Category:People stubs is down to...hold onto your hats...two pages. It's nearly time to focus depopulating efforts elsewhere, so where should we go? NatusRoma 04:42, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Few ideas: Category:Musician stubs is at 22 pages. Category:Musical group stubs, one of its sub cats, is at 18 pages. Category:Film stubs is also at 22. Category:Japan geography stubs is at 20 pages, but that might not be as suited. Those are the only ones at 20 or more. I'd say either Musician or Film would be best. --Mairi 05:09, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
I've been thinking about Japan geography stubs, and it could be a difficult one, unless there's someone here who knows a lot about Japanese geography (of course, it could always be split into the four main islands, but...). Another place which could be seful is in going through the bio-stub categories to make sure that the articles are stubbed by both nationality and occupation. It might also be worth thinking about any future splits and sorting of {{politician-stub}}, {{university-stub}}, and {{sportbio-stub}}, both of which templates are used on around ten or more pages of stubs. {{Film-stub}} and {{musician-stub}} are probably a slightly higher priority. It gives us a few choices for work, though. Grutness...wha? 07:24, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
Having had a look in Category:India-related stubs today 9and whimpered), I think some of the larger Country-stub categories could be looked through, to sort the stubs into geo-stubs, bio-stubs, university-stubs, hist-stubs, struct-stubs etc. If the india one's anything to go by, they're a mess. Grutness...wha? 08:35, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Stubs in multiple categories: Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again?

I am coming across stubs assigned to multiple stub categories and, as a result, sporting multiple stub templates. Also, many stub template authors or editors are using icons in their templates, ignoring the official guideline discouraging icons. This is resulting in some very cluttered little stubs. A solution to the multiple stub messages at the bottom of multi-category stubs would be to separage the process of assigning stubs to categories from the stub template, and go back to using a single generic stub template on all stubs. Perhaps this could be automated with a bot. Finell 07:08, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Multiple stubs is the standard practice at WP:WSS, with two being the recommended number, and three being considered okay but not brilliant. As for icons, it used to be discouraged, and still is for heavy use templates that will be used on several hundred stubs. There's no problem with them at all on lighter use templates.As to separating the processes... Oh Ghu... not again! Every couple of months this one comes up, and every couple of months it gets defeatesd as - to put it bluntly - ridiculous and defeating of the whole exercise of sorting stubs. But not nearly as much so as going back to a generic template that will destroy the last year's worth of work on this project and make it impossible for any editors to find stubs to work on - not to mention crippling the servers by havin one template on a mind-boggling number of articles (at a conservative estimate, I'd say 60,000). Grutness...wha? 08:10, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
I actually think the idea has its merits, because really, what could be better than undoing months upon months of tedious work in order to make the bottom of articles look slightly more pleasing? It's a great idea, you have to admit. --Sn0wflake 18:18, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
Although my solution may be impractical, I definitely was not suggesting undoing the very valuable work of sorting and categorizing the stubs, which enables author-editors to find stubs to expand within their areas of interest and expertise. I thought I made that clear. The stubs would still display their category assignments (however many may be appropriate) in the categories box, but only a single stub message. I have no technical understanding of the burden on Wikipedia's servers caused by large numbers of articles incorporating the same template, so I yield to those who do. Finell 01:08, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
From what I understand, your idea basically involves the modification of current stub templates so that they would contain no visual data, only metadata, thus allowing the articles to be included on categories, but not adding any text/image to the article. The problem I see with that idea is that few people find stub templates obstrusive, as they are already placed outside of the main text body anyway. Unless you have a good argument for suggesting a change of such scope, I don't think there is going to be much support for your idea. --Sn0wflake 01:28, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
No, that is not what I said. I would include, ONCE at the bottom of the stub, the former generic stub template with the VISIBLE italicized message that invites readers to "help Wikipedia" by expanding it. That is what I meant by "only a single stub message" in my last comment above. I would even favor making that message somewhat more prominent, perhaps by formatting it like the current disamgiuation template (set off by horizontal lines). All I object to are multiple nearly identical categorized stub messages, most of them with icons; I would leave the stub categories, NOT the message, in the medadata. But I don't mean to belabor this, and obviously yield to concensus. That is why I raised it on a Talk page; I haven't edited any stubs to conform to my sole views. I'm not that bold. Finell 06:57, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
Well, if that's what you propose I will have to tell you that your idea is not very interesting for the project, and why not say, incredibly complicated. Unless you are willing to write a bot of some sort, that is. Doing the conversion you propose manually is incredibly counterproductive. And really, does the current syste bother you that much? They are just small messages completely outside of the article's space. --Sn0wflake 01:55, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
What's more, the stub messages do act as an incentive to editors. I have been spurred on to edit articles simply by the fact that the message at the bottom has asked me to. Grutness...wha? 05:55, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
I agree with you. Please see my reply to Sn0wflake immediately above. Finell 06:57, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
Fair enough - I realsied after I'd written that that that point wouldn't make much difference. But the multiple stub message isn't really much of an annoyance - certainly not enough of an annoyance to go about rewriting the 400 or so different stub templates. The annoying thing is that there are stubs at all. It's the length of the article that makes these things ugly, rather than the templates on the bottom - as was pointed out the last time something like this was suggested about five months ago. Grutness...wha? 07:25, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps multiple stub templates will irritate someone into expanding a stub, and I sarcastically suggest a multi-stub template saying "This article is a stub in multiple categories and you are invited to supply details in all the categories so as to get rid of all these messages." (SEWilco 02:57, 3 October 2005 (UTC))

I withdraw my suggestion in view of the responses. Finell 03:16, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

With respect, and with no intention of insulting you or your suggestion, perhaps it would be worth watching how a particular project works for a while in future before making suggestions about how it can be changed. With so many people working on wikipedia, chances are that many alternative methods of doing things have been tried and rejected in the past - something that may not be immediately clear to someone who has been on Wikipedia about three weeks. Suggestions are welcome, but suggestions which have been considered and soundly rejected in the past are likely to receive less than welcoming responses. Re-reading my original response, I could have been less confrontational, so apologies if any offence was taken! Grutness...wha? 05:11, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
You owe me no apology, but I agree with the rest of your message. I apologize for not considering the history before commenting. Finell 08:08, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Template:Stub

User:Radiant! unprotected Template:Stub several months ago claiming its use was deprecated by this WikiProject. That allowed a vandal to place over a megabyte of data in that template, rendering pages with this template unloadable (the requests timed out), and the problem could only be identified with the help of a developer. Regardless of the opinion held by members of this WikiProject, that template is still used by some users, including myself. If members of this WikiProject feel compelled to run around behind us, categorising our stub tags for us, go right ahead. But I don't have any inclination to do that, and I am not a member of this WikiProject so please do not render the one stub tag I do use susceptible to vandalism by unprotecting it. - Mark 04:04, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

The unprotection was not because it was deprecated (it isn't deprecated, and never has been) - just that it was now used by few enough articles that changes to it weren't going to put a lot of starin on the servers. The original reason for protection was that changes to any template used on 14,000 articles (which it was) would create havoc with the Wiki. Since the number of "pure" stubs was down to a couple of hundred, this was no longer a danger. However, if people are vandalising the stub template, then perhaps the idea of protecting it needs to be revisited. Grutness...wha? 07:13, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
Actually, as a result of someone's edit, Template:Stub recently displayed in visable text a statement that the use of that template is deprecated due to Stub sorting, which therefore appeared on all stubs that used the template. I remarked negatively about making the deprecation message visible at Template_talk:Stub#Undeprecate_the_generic_stub_template and, independently, bureaucrat Rdsmith4 removed the the deprecation message from Template:Stub. In any event, it appears that Template:Stub is now protected. Finell 08:05, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Project WikiSort

Hey everyone, this is just a reminder that WikiSort, a subproject of the Version 1.0 Editorial Team, has begun! This project has the potential to eliminate stubs, so come check it out! the1physicist 05:22, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

The next big thing

With bio-stub thoroughly demolished, the first item on the "Things to do" list is no longer valid. What should it be replaced with? There are four "big" stub types currently:

  • Musician stubs (23 pages)
  • Musical group stubs (22 pages)
  • Film stubs (25 pages)
  • American people stubs (22 pages)

According to the stub types list, Musical group stubs is probably not suitable right now as it has no listed child stub types. Musician stubs or Film stubs might be the most appropriate as they have the highest number of child stub types and would therefore (hopefully) easily be spread out.

(I am aware that there was a similar post-bio-stub discussion earlier in the page, but that was more of a "what should we do now?", rather than a "what should we recommend to newcomers?", as this is supposed to be.) --TheParanoidOne 22:49, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

well, one possibility - I've just split three subcategories off {{Party-stub}} (Asia- Africa- and Euro-party-stub). Category:Party related stubs needs a lot of sifting into the new categories. Grutness...wha? 07:55, 22 October 2005 (UTC)
This puts me in mind of something I was considering recently: should we have a "to do" page? Specifically, with a ranked list of over-sized stub categories, along with a note of stub categories that have been proposed and assented to, but not yet created and/or sorted. This might, possibly, help keep the size of WSS/P down somewhat.
I wouldn't count bio-stub out yet, though. Several of its sub-categories are now over 800... Alai 00:23, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
Not a bad idea - a lot of wikiprojects have a "to-do" list on their main page. Grutness...wha? 02:03, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
't be a tad spammy for that, but could link from the template, say. Here's a draft of some possible content, sans additional canned text... Alai 05:27, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
That looks nice. Would it also be useful to include the number of existing subcategories, to give an idea of whether the category mostly needs to have new ones created, or whether it's more sorting into existing ones? As that could affect what people want to do... --Mairi 05:41, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
Mmm. I was thinking more in terms of ones that have already been split, but need sorting down. The party stubs one I mentioned above is an example of that. BTW, one of those about halfway up the list (Scotland-geo-stub) is high on my personal list of "to-do"s. I'm just waiting until the England-geo-stubs are winnowed down a little more first (preferably completely - there are only about a dozen counties not done!) Grutness...wha? 05:55, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
Good points, both. I was thinking in terms of having a list of too-big sources, and of un-/under-populated targets, though separately listed; if the two can be integrated, so much the better. Or possibly simply a single page with a "to be created" list (post-approval from /P), a "to be populated" list (likewise, or where re-sorting is required due to further "accretion" to the root cat), and a "to be split" list (anything oversized, perhaps with an indication of current plan/status, or simply a link to /P discussion). Alai 06:08, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Rescoped this, and accordingly moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/To do. Making any more sense yet? I'm uncertain how to handle the need-sorting-down cases; a list of source and/target categories? Or of links to the proposals page? If we could do this in a way that facilitated "clearing" the proposals page any faster, that'd be a boon, but I don't want to do this in a way that ends up making more work. Alai 03:29, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Going to add this to the project template, as it's now in the associated category, and seeing at least a modest amount of use. I'm not quite happy with yet, but I'll be unlikely to do much further work on populating, restructuring, or canned-textifying it for a while as I'm shortly be going on an enforced wiki-semi-break (due to how crap Irish broadband suppliers are about facilitating the transition between one and another). So I reckon the best way to get it "fixed" is to go live, and have people edit it mercilessly, to coin a phrase. Alai 23:53, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Category stubs

When I come across a stub category page, eg Category:Australian rules football stubs, is it appropriate to place the stub template there so editors know what it looks like? --Commander Keane 08:47, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

It's not something we usually do. It has the problem of a recursive link (by putting the template on the category, the category becomes a subcategory of itself, which - while not a real problem - looks bad). Normally what we do is put a template link to the template at the top of it like this:
 To add a stub to this category, add {{tl|Foo-stub}} to it
That way, if editors want to see what the template looks like, they just need to click the link.
Grutness...wha? 10:51, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Substology

There is some discussion regarding the subst'ing of templates, and a bot is under development that will automate the task. I would like to ask your opinion on subst'ing stub templates. Please take a look at Wikipedia:Subst. Radiant_>|< 15:51, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

I would strongly oppose using subst with stub templates. This would make future stub-sorting and the removal of stub-tags much harder, it would also make cahning the wordign of a stub tag ineffective on already stubed articles. Please don't do this. DES (talk) 17:55, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
User:Radiant! has, unfortunately, brought this to your attention without placing it in context. The page referred to lists a set of templates that are purported to be OK and desireable to always insert via the "subst" method. This list does not include stub templates. Nonetheless, it might be useful to put in 2-cents to indicate views with regard to stub templates as a class. Regards, Courtland 18:03, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

However, we are major users of {{tl}} and of {{cl}}, and those are being proposed for always-being-subst'd/auto-subst'd. I'd imagine this would tend to make discussion pages that're part of WSS look rather unsightly. Alai 19:23, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

And come to that, always/auto-substing has been suggested for stub types (on the talk page), it's just not on the "current list" on the project/proposed policy page. Alai 19:58, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
Fair enough .. maybe I was caught in an "anti-panic" moment there and came down too hard. As for changes in the appearance of a template depending on whether or not it is subject to subst, it should not change from the perspective of someone viewing the page. I tested on the Sandbox and found that both {{tl|disambig}} and {{subst:tl|disambig}} gave the same appearance to viewers of the page, but in the source of the page, they appeared as {{tl|disambig}} and {{[[Template:disambig|disambig]]}}, respectively. Is this what you refer to as making things look unsightly, from the source perspective? Courtland 00:25, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
Consider what {{sfd-current}} would look like with those to subst'ed. Mind you, {{sfd-current}} itself would be unusable if it had to be subst'ed! Grutness...wha? 00:41, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Images on stub templates starting to slow Wikipedia (again)

Back around when images were first being added to all the stub templates, there was suddenly an announcement of an 'emergency' hardware expenditure necessitated by the image server becoming a bottleneck due to the increased number of image requests. I've noticed the image server seems to be becoming a bottleneck once again (the text loads fairly quickly, but the images often take an extra 30 seconds or so). Since the images on stub templates (and the like) are certainly non-critical, and at best just 'nice to have', I suggest we remove all images from stub templates (and similar 'nice to have' uses) so we can spend Wikipedia financial/server/bandwidth resources for more urgent uses. Niteowlneils 22:25, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

For example, it took so long to wait for Image:Evolution-tasks2.png (linked near the top) to load after the rest of the page was done, my browser (Firefox) finally gave up. Niteowlneils 22:33, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
I see that User:RedWolf commented out the image in {{Album-stub}} on 16 November to "reduce image server load". Should we consider doing this to all stub templates with images? --Bruce1ee 06:32, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

No interest in stub sorting

Hi, I'm actually here to write complete articles, not to sort stubs. Thanks, Silly rabbit 02:34, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

That's great. We certainly need more ppl like you. We can even work together. We sort stubs so you can easily find them and make them into full articles. -- Zondor 02:44, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
There are 100 stub sorters, and many thousands of wiki editors. We do the job so you don't have to. Grutness...wha? 03:35, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
It's easier to sort stubs than to write complete articles. Although we appreciate your work, I was directed here by a please help link, and I have no wish to help in your efforts. No offense. Silly rabbit 04:50, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
I suppose that makes us Scrubbing Bubbles ;) Courtland 03:53, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

So we are harassing ppl. How about we reform our summary comments with a more NPOV message that just describes and/or provide a link to the project. -- Zondor 05:18, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

No, that's unnecessary. I was just venting because I made a few stubs while writing a few articles, and the stub-sorters were on my tail like molasses. Kinda made me angry that they vandalized the talk page with a big box thingy, but I am willing to forgive given the vigilant job you do here (now that I have educated myself a bit). Keep up the good work, and I'll try to keep my stubs nice and sorted from now on. Thanks, Silly rabbit 05:33, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
I posted that on the talk, am new to stub sorting, and got a little confused, certainly not trying to annoy! Hopefully all this stub sorting will continue to lead to more knowledgeable contributors adding to the articles (I hope it adds to *my* articles!) Xaosflux 05:37, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
No problemo. Thanks, Silly rabbit 05:50, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
Wait a minute -- I think you need to back off from that accusation of vandalism, User:Silly rabbit. Courtland 06:11, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
Right, I meant to say "posted an utterly irrelevant and unsightly piece of garbage in the talk page." But I couldn't quite find the words at the time. Perhaps, "accidental mishap" is a better description under the circumstances. :P Silly rabbit 06:44, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Wait up - I'm confused. Why would a stub sorter put anything on the talk page of an article, especially a "big box thingy"? Grutness...wha? 07:26, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

"Big box thingy" example. I was confused as well. That's why I reverted the edit. I don't know why he did it. But he's new here, so go easy on the guy. Ok? Thanks, Silly rabbit 08:10, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
The box was the one mentioned earlier on this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Stub_sorting#Notice_on_talk_pages, to wit:
Stub-sorting Wikiproject

This stub-notice is maintained by WikiProject Stub sorting, an attempt to bring some sort of order to Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can choose to improve/expand the articles containing this stub notice, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

Thinking that this was part of the project I posted it on one of my earlier stub-sorts, hoping that it would NOT OFFEND the original contributor when sorting their article to a stub topic, and thinking that it's use would let them know that we were working on making their article more visible for potential on-topic editors. After sorting I proablly never would have looked at the article again (out of my scope of editorial interest). If we want to use this template perhaps the wording could be updated to make it clear what the intention of this project is. Personally I just don't use it anymore. I don't think that it's insertion was vandalism, nor do i think that Silly rabbit's clearing of it from the talk page of that article was inapproriate. Hopefully this will be the end of this confusion. Xaosflux 06:20, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Note what the box says - "This stub notice is maintained..." It's used on the talk pages of stub templates, particularly those which have been subject to edit wars or other unnecessary amendments. Not on article talk pages. Perhaps that needs to be more clearly explained at WP:STUB.... Grutness...wha? 07:36, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
Let me set one thing straight, the original author is NOT OFFENDED AT ALL. I hope some good comes out of this conversation, but I really wish you no ill will at all User:Xaosflux. I've already put the whole thing behind me, but I really don't want to see you treated unfairly because of my remarks. I apologize most sincerely if I've caused problems for you. Silly rabbit 08:29, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
Don't worry - I think I'm probably speaking for all WP:WSS people when I say that we're not angry with Xaosflux - in fact, we're very happy that he's decided to join the project (welcome aboard!). And sorry if I sound grumpy about things at times here (it's very difficult to express feelings properly in this form of communication). Xaosflux will have learnt that the templates are not used, we've learnt to make sure that the information about that template is a bit clearer... hopefully everyone's come out of this fine and some good's been done! Grutness...wha? 09:24, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
Do you think that a slight modification to the box text should be made to clarify the intent that this notice is related to templates and not to articles? P.S. if yes, I have some thoughts on that but would want to start a new discussion thread to address it. Courtland 13:35, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
Possibly... I've made a few changes to the information on templates we have at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting and put something on the template's discussion page, which may be enough, though. Grutness...wha? 01:11, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Stub Sorting clarification

I've been working on stub sorting, but am a little confused, I've been mostly sorting unmarked stubs and the {stub} stubs; but have only been sorting in to the catagories on : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Stub_types; but also see this list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Stub_categories Which should be used for these purposes? Xaosflux 05:28, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

The oofficial list is the one at WP:WSS/ST, so use that. Any stubs that are in the category but not there should be reported at WP:WSS/D so that we can see whether or not they'd be useful before either making them official or sending them for deletion. BTW, welcome to the project! Grutness...wha? 07:32, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Boilerplate for editorial input on stub designation

I've been thinking a bit about how to graduate more articles from being stubs other than writing more (lazy, aren't I ;) ). Consider Habakkuk — this article had a stub template added in March 2005 and has gone through a number of edits since then but has not expanded or substantially changed in content. One might rightly argue that its length alone graduates it from stub-status and it shouldn't have been stubbed in the first place, but I want to explore a different path than that one. In this case, I've added some text to the talk page which is intended to pass the baton regarding stub-status back to editors knowledgable about the domain in which the article sits. The text added .. 

     ==Stub status==
     ''to content knowledgable editors''

     The stub template was added to this article in March 2005 and the text has not expanded since that time.  Should we assume that 
     the article is reasonably comprehensive for top level concepts related to the topic and that it is merely lacking detail?  If 
     yes, then the article could be removed from the stub category, having graduated from it.  Thanks for the input.

I am thinking that some modification of this could be used as boilerplate to attack the mounting stub counts from a different quarter, though its usage should be judicious and not blanket across all stub'd articles lest it reflect bot activity rather than specific editorial consideration.

Thanks for your thoughts. Courtland 13:54, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Tactics in the "war on stubs" - graduation from stub status

I've posted a note on the talk page for WikiProject Albums that proposes a set of guidelines to assist in determining when an article in the "musical album" topic area should be considered a stub or not. The set of guidelines is presented as a checklist that draws directly from the information about suggested content for album articles present on the WikiProject's main page. I believe, as stated at the bottom of the referenced addition, that one answer to reducing the number of stubs overall is to couple the activities of topical WikiProjects with those of the stub sorting community, one way being the insertion of guideline sets such as that proposed. If one were to take a longer term view this could be seen as one step down the road toward bot-assisted stub tagging/de-tagging based on content via reading of a set of content tags embedded in each article ... but that's only one possible future. Regards, Courtland 14:14, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

While I think it's a good idea in theory, I'm not really sure it's possible in practice, for pretty much the reasons you've given yourself. Each wikiproject is going to have its own ideas for what is and what isn't a stub - extrapolating from that, we'd need a set of guidelines for articles which would vary widely from topic to topic, or even for different subjects within topics. I'm not sure that's really practical (I'd like to be proved wrong, mind you). Grutness...wha? 01:39, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

If I come across a stub that seems pretty detailed (many paragraphs of relevant information generally) in stub sorting that was recently flagged as a stub I've been graduating them from (stub) to (expand), infering that that is what the stub flagger wanted. Xaosflux 00:31, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

That seems quite reasonable. Thanks. Courtland 00:38, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

I think such guidelines would be useful, but not for classic stub sorting (can't look up these criteria every time), but for someone going through a stub category with the specific intent of removing stub notices. Also note that this works well only for stub categories which contain very similar items, like albums (or video games, etc.) - I think such a guideline for {{math-stub}} would be pretty impossible, since the articles are just too diverse in there. -- grm_wnr Esc 23:58, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Busiest WikiProject?

Just thought y'all would like to know that I've just been looking at the fascinating, if surprising List of Wikipedia pages that have been edited the most. Of the four most edited wikiproject pages, three of them are WP:WSS pages (with the Stub types list, of all things, in first place). Only the talk page of WP Mathematics (3rd) knocks us out of a clean sweep of the top three. And since WP:SFD, a closely related page to ours, is also in the same ball-park, editwise, I suspect that makes this the busiest wikiproject! :) Grutness...wha? 00:14, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Somethings to keep in mind: a) the listing does not include talk pages, b) some WikiProjects opt to have their core definition pages to be quite stable while most of the editing occurs on non-WikiProject pages (for example: WikiProject:Disambiguation). I'm not trying to be a wet blanket, just injecting some additional context to help in interpreting the numbers. Courtland 04:45, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
There are quite a large number of talk pages listed (including wikipedia talk, user talk, and article talk pages). As I said above, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics was third most edited project page. Grutness...wha? 05:26, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
If edits of WP:WSS/P and WP:WSS/C (its predecessor) were combined, their total number would be around that of Michael Jackson. :) Conscious 07:24, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

The use of <noinclude> in stub templates

In templates on my watchlist I see more and more <noinclude> being used, for instance to display graphics on the template page, or for linking to equivalent templates on sister wikis. Sometimes the <noinclude> and its contents get deleted by other editors, sometimes not. Does WSS have any recommendations for or against the use of <noinclude> in stub templates? Thanks. --Eddi (Talk) 11:56, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

It seems to be generally considered a good idea across the project to put in stuff about when to use the template and what categories it populates. Susvolans ⇔ 12:21, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
In general it hasn't come up; some templates have noincluded interwiki links, which I think makes sense. As far as general as explanatory text, that's not too practical since most stub templates are created using {{subst:metastub}}, and noinclude sections don't show up with subst. I'm also not sure what else would make sense to have in includeonly tags. The only thing that's really been discussed is to not put the associated category in <includeonly> tags, but to use noincludes to sort the template to the beginning of the category (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals#Include-only for stub categories on stub templates). --Mairi 19:42, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
Thank you for your comments. There was an edit summary for a template less than a month ago stating that "... is considered harmful" but now I cant remember if "..." was noinclude or includeonly, or which template it was for. I didn't think much about it at the time, until I realised that the usage was increasing. Anyway, I'll just leave it for now. --Eddi (Talk) 00:12, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
One important caveat with this - please don't noinclude or includeonly the category name such that it doesn't show up when the template is viewed. It's important for stub sorters to be able to check that a template correctly links to an appropriate category at a glance! Grutness...wha? 06:00, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
Hrm, that's exactly what's being proposed over there. Or more precisely, to replace the included categorisation with a link to the category. Alai 06:50, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Medicine stubs

I'm not formally a participant of this project, but I noticed that there is a notice in Category:Medicine stubs that the category is becoming too large. If someone could create Category:Medical organization stubs (or something similar) and its associated template, I could move a bunch of professional organizations and hospitals into it. Thanks! Edwardian 07:04, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Ditto for Category:Diseases stubs. Edwardian 07:09, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
I'll move this suggestion to the Proposals page - it's not a bad idea. Those are two subcategories we don't have which might be very helpful (as might hospital-stub) Grutness...wha? 07:43, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Multi-stubbing

Also on Wikipedia_talk:stub, I've taken another tilt at the old windmill of toning down the wording on not using more than two stub tags, which IMO ignores much stub-sorting practice, and indeed much of the whole logic of the category system. Lacking an actual X-Y-Z-stub for a given entity that's equally an X, Y, and Z, we'd end up having to choose an essentially arbitary subset. Anyone else care to weigh in, either way...? Alai 06:54, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Systematic mis-use of vocab-stub

Stub-sorting was in part aimed at avoiding the problem of having one huge stub category containing stubs on a whole mish-mash of subjects. However, this is still happening because stub sorters are mis-using {{vocab-stub}}. It seems that {{vocab-stub}} is being used as a synonym for "miscellaneous", and growing the very sort of mish-mash stub category that stub-sorting was supposed to prevent.

Please do not use {{vocab-stub}} as a dumping ground for miscellaneous stubs that you cannot find another stub category for.

I am going to go through Category:Vocabulary and usage stubs and remove all stubs that have nothing to do with either vocabulary or usage (such as platter, premonition, and support engineering). Uncle G 17:05, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps a small "please do not use this as a miscellany category" note next to {{vocab-stub}}'s listing on WP:WSS/ST would help? I know when I began stub-sorting, that was the one project page that got the vast majority of my attention, learning all the stub types, and I still refer to it very frequently. I'll bet other stub-sorters do too. If I had seen that one sentence then, I would have been on guard against that, and avoided several mistakes I've made. -GTBacchus(talk) 09:31, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

  • Regarding articles like platter, this is now a technology stub, how can this possibly be better, this article to me appears to be about the definitions of the word or phrase platter, not about any specific use of it. This article would probally best be turned in to a disambig one day, but not how it is now, as it appears vocab-stub seems to be the best place to me. xaosflux Talk/CVU 22:45, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
    • platter is not a dictionary article about the word "platter". (A dictionary article about the word would provide its etymology, usage, synonyms, antonyms, pronunciations, translations, inflections, parts of speech, quotations, related words, and so forth.) It is an encyclopaedia article about platters, describing two different types of them and the materials that they are composed of. Please stop abusing {{vocab-stub}}. Uncle G 05:40, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
      • Noone here is trying to build a dictionary, but some articles are not about the relationship of their subjects to applicable use, simply about how the phrase is used. (This is not a defense of platter being a vocab stub, as I said above I think it will end up being a disambig pointing to articles that are about the use of the subjects of the articles). Did I miss somewhere that vocab-stub is to be used to turn something in to a dictionary article, thus invalidating it from this project? xaosflux Talk/CVU 07:23, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Lately I've had some issues regarding the proper use of the vocab stub category, and have opened an open discussion in an attempt to come to a consensus on It's talk page. Please take a look there and make comments. Thank you. xaosflux Talk/CVU 04:48, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Total number of stubs (some statistics)

According to Category:Stub categories, there are 1446 stub categories. After adding all numbers listed at today's version of WP:WSS/ST (they are given for 1252 categories, others are new or not listed), I obtained an estimated value of 332000±1700 stubs (each stub counted as many times as many tags it contains).

If one assumes there are 1.5 tags on an average stub, this would mean that there are 220000 stubs in Wikipedia (25% of total number of articles). Conscious 13:09, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Sounds logical. --Celestianpower háblame 18:11, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
And if we assume that approximately 50% of stubs still need sorting properly, and that there are indeed 117 regular stub sorters, then we each have about 940 stubs to sort. Dodgy maths I know, but it does make it seem a bit less daunting when you only have a thousand stubs each! Mushintalk 12:26, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
There are times when it feels like I've seen all 220 000... of course, the poroblem is that Wikipedia is growing exponentially, and so is the number of stubs. But 940's a nice total to think about. After all, Category:Stubs once had 15000 stubs in it. It's currently got 29. Grutness...wha? 01:10, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

I just scanned the database, there are about 350,000 articles with a stub tag, this does include section-stub tags as well. Martin 18:03, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

I recently computed some statistics along the same vein and made charts. See User:Dantheox/Stub percentages for a chart of both the number of articles and stubs, and the number of stubs as a percentage of total articles. The rapid growth in the total stub count over the past two years has been pretty spectacular. --Dantheox 06:57, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
Maybe not for the reasons you think, though. The number of articles marked stub has been rising since stub sorting has got more systematic - in the early days (as recently asa year or so ago) most short articles weren't marked as stubs. I'm not saying that there aren't a bigger proportion of stubs now, just that the figures may be a bit misleading. Another factor which may mean there are more stubs now is that - as the number of articles increases, increasingly obscure subjects are being found for articles. The early Wikipedian articles were on subjects that were relatively easy to expand. Many more recent articles may well be relating to subjects which can't be expanded nearly so readily. Grutness...wha? 23:48, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I'm entirely willing to accept this as the reason that the stub percentage has been increasing -- it would be hard to believe that there really were no stubs before 2004! But the charts are meaningful then as a gauge of the progress of this project. I was also surprised to find out that nearly 40% of articles are stubs (possibly more than that now). Now that we've reached a million articles, maybe flesching out the ~400,000 of those stubs should become a higher priority. --Dantheox 02:51, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
Fleshing out the articles has always been the no. 1 top priority. But in order for editors to be able to find articles that relate to their field of expertise, someone has to sort them. So we sort stubs - I'm sure the majority of stub sorters also spend time expanding articles. The list of "saves from AFD" on my user page lists a few of those that I've expanded considerably, and I'm sure I'm not the only stub-sorter expanding articles. Grutness...wha? 06:11, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

MFD's

Note to anyone on the project who hasn't seen these yet: Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion and Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals are both up for Miscellany for deletion. You may want to stop in there and make a comment. xaosflux Talk/CVU 04:23, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Userbox

I've created a userbox for particpants in this wikiproject to add it to their userpage. Use {{User wikipedia/WikiProject Stub sorting participants}}:

This user is a participant in WikiProject Stub sorting.
Thanks, just added it!xaosflux Talk/CVU 00:41, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
This userbox has apparently been deleted, are there any plans to remake a userbox for Wikiproject stub sorting? Many of the other projects still have userboxes. Mushintalk 15:29, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

I think what actually happened is that {{user wikipedia}}'s parameters were deprecated in favor of {{participant}}. We can either use that or make our own. Circeus 16:09, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Can somebody who knows about this kind of thing make it up then, please? Mushintalk 17:33, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
Ah ok I see what you mean. I'll use {{participant}} then. Mushintalk 17:35, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
Actually, a new usebx would better, as {{participant}} links the improper category Circeus 17:36, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
Hold on, would it not be a good idea to move Category:WikiProject Stub sorting participants to Category:Participants in WikiProject WikiProject Stub sorting then? Mushintalk 17:42, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
Seeing the administrator box moved to {{User wikipedia/Administrator}}, I've created one for us at {{User wikipedia/Stub sorting}}. Slambo (Speak) 17:41, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll use that for now then. If they mess stuff around again, we may need to move the cat as I said above? Mushintalk 17:44, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
If you make the template add users to Category:WikiProject Stub sorting participants then we can add it to the category page accordingly. Mushintalk 17:47, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
Please note, this template has been restored, but there is discussion on its page. xaosflux Talk/CVU 05:02, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Stub non-sorters

I just found this page today. In the short term, we have four editors who have stated that they will not use any of the stub subtypes. The arguments that I can see center around the WP:SFD process and its interactions with AFD, TFD and CFD. There is also a mention of a "lack of a clearly defined stub naming policy" that I find hard to reconcile (WP:STUB and WP:WSS/P cover this). The question is, what do we need to do before we're asked to present the 27 8x10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one? Slambo (Speak) 16:24, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Okay, so I just read the MFD debate; from what I can tell, it looks like the whole debate centers around the deletion of a stub template redirect. Specifically, the deletion of {{us-rail-stub}} which was a redirect to {{US-rail-stub}} was carried out on RFD and not SFD (I'm probably missing something here), so the editor deemed SFD either as redundant or overreaching when compared with the RFD/TFD/CFD processes. To me, it looks like the real problem is that someone took a stub template redirect deletion to the wrong place, so the solution would be to modify the RFD/TFD/CFD procedures to specify that anything related to stub templates should be discussed only on SFD. Right? Slambo (Speak) 16:49, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
The redirect situation is complicated and will get serious resistance if you unilaterally try to make stub redirects a SFD issue at this point. Discussion is at RFD talk as far as I know, chip in if you're interested. As for User:SPUI/SFD: Do nothing. Their refusal to use sorted stub templates is a prerogative of theirs, and does not add significant overhead. The rallying page is an annoyance, but not worth getting in conflicts over. While I don't want to accuse these editors of trolling (They may have some legitimate concerns), I nonetheless suggest not to feed them. What should be done, deleting the page? Nothing but more trouble can come of this. (Although I find it amusing that people accuse WSS of creating too much bureaucracy and want a tighter policy at the same time). -- grm_wnr Esc 17:08, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
As long as there are no relevant users involved, I do not think there is much to be concerned over. If an editor decides to take this path instead of discussing the issue at hand, than it's the editor' own problem, as long as he or she does not interfere with our work. --Sn0wflake 17:39, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
Cool, thanks. I had guessed that things were already moving in that direction, and now that I read RFD talk, I find that I agree with the solutions that were presented there and that are already in the works. I don't patrol Category:Stubs, so I wasn't entirely aware of the impact to the main category (but I do wander through Category:Rail stubs as that's my own area of expertise). I've seen several stubs tagged with {{Train-stub}} instead of {{Rail-stub}}, so I'll sit back and watch to see the outcome. Slambo (Speak) 18:40, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

A user has added "and citing the source of your information." to a ton of stubs

User:Jengod has decided to change around 150 stubs adding "and citing the source of your information." after "This article [...] is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it". Apparently this has been done without consulting other users first. Since many articles are double- (or even triple-)stubbed, this line will now be all over the place. I believe that it should be removed immediately, people can be nagged about citing sources elsewhere. A discussion on this issue is taking place at Wikipedia_talk:Stub#Addition_of_.22cite_your_sources.22, and I'd like to hear the opinion of other users. Please note that some of these edits have been made to stubs which can only be accessed by administrators, so it'll take an administrator to undo them (this applies to e.g. {{UK-politician-stub}} and {{US-politician-stub}}). Regards. --Valentinian 15:11, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

This issue has been resolved. --Valentinian 18:59, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Category:Stub templates

Should our stub templates be categorized under Category:Stub templates? —Mark Adler (markles) 20:17, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

This seems to be duplicating the work of Category:Stub categories. It was created on Dec 14th and I don't recall any discussions with WSS about it. --TheParanoidOne 22:11, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Well, there's the Articles that are stubs, (for example, Gen. Artemas Ward Homestead)
and then there are the templates that indicate a stub (for example, Template:Massachusetts-stub, which looks like:
Flag of Massachusetts This Massachusetts-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
It's this template, above, that I'm talking about.—Mark Adler (markles) 22:24, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
... which appears to want to duplicate the stub types list, albeit in Category form. --TheParanoidOne 23:29, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Orphaning stub redirects

Would there be any objections to me routinely running Mairibot on the redirects listed at WP:WSS/R to orphan them? Ones that could be used for a future split (which ought to be marked with {{R with possibilities}}) would be left alone. Doing so has been mentioned a few times, and would help alleviate the possible server-load problems. --Mairi 04:33, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Seems like a reasonable plan. Assuming there are no major objections, I could help you out with TPO-bot, once it gets the bot flag. --TheParanoidOne 06:05, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Talking of redirects... have you had a look at WP:SFD lately? Or, for that matter, at [SPUI's fun on Dec. 24th? Grutness...wha? 07:59, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Great. The fun just get ... funner. :sigh:. --TheParanoidOne 22:28, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

I'll start orphaning them tonight... --Mairi 02:09, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

The impact of template redirects

Extreme Unction has initiated an interesting discussion on the actual impact of template redirects. --TheParanoidOne 00:57, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Deletion logs

there are a lot of old deletion logs in Category:Stubs, and it look like they need an admin to clean them up and remove them from there. anyone able to help? BL kiss the lizard 06:22, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm on it, but those pages are ... big! --TheParanoidOne 13:30, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
Done. --TheParanoidOne 14:45, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

WSS backlog

We have a rather large backlog. Each of us has some field of interests, and it seems that people work alone sorting different categories, and eventually get bored (at least if there's a lot to do). Let's concentrate our efforts! For example, we can take Category:Album stubs. It's 24 pages long, sorted through A and has a lot of relatively new subcategories. We can put large neon signs at WP:WSS and WP:WSS/T asking for help and expect that category to fall in a week or two. Then we can mark something else as our major work.

What about this plan? Does anyone have alternative ideas? At the moment it seems we're creating more work for ourselves at WP:WSS/P than we can manage. Conscious 14:09, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Good plan. There's a "Things to do" section of the WSS page. Perhaps that needs to be emphasised some more. Or may hilight one (eg. Album stubs) as a "This is what we are all focusing on now. Come and help." type thing? --TheParanoidOne 23:04, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Unless there are any objections, I'm going to create a template {{WPSSfocus}} and place it in WP:WSS and WP:WSS/T. It'll look like:

The current focus of WikiProject Stub sorting is Category:Album stubs.

Albums in this category should be sorted by genre, where appropriate. The category had more than 4600 entries on December 29.
Current status: albums starting with A sorted. (please update as task progresses)

WSS census

This suggestion is not that serious, and comes out of curiosity. I wonder how many stub-sorters are active, and how many are former members. To find this out, project participants can be asked just to sign their name on some page. All that's needed is a note at WP:WSS and probably at WP:WSS/T and WP:WSS/P. Conscious 14:09, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Tools

I don't know if this overlaps with existing tools, or not, but if people have some spare time, I'd like some help with Category:Album stubs. I have a tool that identifies things that really obviously should be sorted, there are currently ~1200 articles identified (that's 6 of the 24 pages in album stubs):

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/reports/output/?C=S;O=D

While it's not a bot, it does make the work much quicker. Those reports currently list articles that are 1) in Category:Album stubs, and 2) which are in a category whose name contains eg. "rock", OR 2b) the album-stub links to an article whose name contains eg. "rock". So these are the blindingly obvious ones, but maybe it will help some.

If there are other ideas for reports, or if the current reports need to be run again to purge the items that have already been sorted, ping my talk page. (it would be really nice to grep for "progressive" in the article's text, but at the moment, article text isn't available on the toolserver due to some technical issues. Link data is available though) --Interiot 19:32, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

I've whipped up a little monobook.js extension that helps tremendously when sorting stubs - if anyone wants to try it, put the contents of this revision of my user monobook.js into your user monobook. Tested with Firefox 1.5, but should work with any recent browser. Obviously, the Monobook skin is needed. Usual disclaimers apply, use at your own risk, etc. It's also pretty hard-coded, so remove it again once you don't need it anymore. -- grm_wnr Esc 23:30, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
That's pretty cool. --Interiot 00:06, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

This looks very useful, although it should be used with some caution...to extend your example, just because an album stub uses the word "rock" in its article doesn't necessarily mean it's a rock album stub (an album of hymns containing the track "Rock of Ages" wouldn't be, for instance). It would certainly help with identifying subs that can be looked at for re-sorting though. Grutness...wha? 23:54, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, the list currently is only based off of words in the links (it ignores other words in the article), which tends to make the good/bad ratio better (something like 90% for the metal category that I'm going through), but yeah, that's still not 100%. --Interiot 00:06, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

New objective: untagged stubs

I have generated a list of untagged stubs, they are all very short articles with no stub tag and there are quite a few of them, they all need to be sorted! Martin 14:30, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

I have also made a list of long articles with a stub tag. Martin 14:38, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! But both of those lists need to be treated with a little caution. I note that the first list contains quite a few disambiguation pages, which - by definition - aren't stubs. As to the second section, you can get stub articles that have one line of description followed by a very long list of examples. Unless the first part of each of those articles is extended, they are still very much stubs - but might be of quite some size. An example of that from your list is Canadian Football Hall of Fame - a short paragraph with virtually nothing on the Hall of Fame itself, followed simply by a list of everyone inducted. And have a look at the arrondissement articles listed there - they're almost all like that. There is no one-to-one correlation between article length and whether it's a stub. Grutness...wha? 12:45, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
Most of the problems with the untagged stub list are due to the fact that the database dump is 1 month old, and since then many of them have been tagged (either with disambig or stub), I suspect the dump will be updated again soon, then it will be a great way to identify untagged stubs and disambigs. I appreciate there isnt a 1 to 1 correlation with long articles and non-stubs, but the correlation is good enough to identify quite a lot. Martin 13:01, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
I'm not saying that this list-creation is a bad thing - far from it, it will be very useful. I'm just suggesting a bit of wariness about assuming that what's there needs/doesn't need a tag. Are disambiguation pages automatically removed from the short article list, BTW? If so, then the ones I saw there would have been due to being re-tagged since the database dump was run (similarly, I noticed a few short articles which did have stub tags). It looks like someone has gone through and written a LOT of Greek mythology stubs, BTW! Grutness...wha? 13:08, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
Yes it does ignore disambigs, in fact it ignores a page with any template, after the next datadump it will hopefully be much more useful. I added a brief note on the page to highlight the issues you raised, thanks Martin 13:57, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Ill add this to the "to do" list. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 02:57, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

India bio stub

The Template:India-bio-stub puts all articles with that stub in Category:Indian people stubs, but also in Category:Indian people. Is there a way for the stub the only put articles in the stub category? It seems so pointless to have a musician in a indian musicians category and also in the indian people category, plus it makes the category so large. Garion96 (talk) 21:46, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

It shouldn't have been doing that. I have removed the "Indian people" category from the template. --TheParanoidOne 22:05, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
I tried that too, but still the articles were and are in the category. Does it take time for those changes to go into effect? Garion96 (talk) 22:11, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
Still does not work. The articles are still in the category indian people. However, when you look at a specific article, like Amjad Ali Khan it doesn't say the article is in the category indian people. Weird...Garion96 (talk) 12:15, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
That's the way templates work. Those articles will stay in the indian people category until they are next edited, and then they'll be removed from it. When a template is changed, all articles using that template need to be null-edited for any associated category changes to take effect. With so many articles in Category:Indian people stubs, it would be a long job to do that, though, unless we use a bot to null-edit them all. Grutness...wha? 12:40, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
I guess I should have done that when I made the change to the template. I'll get my bot on it. --TheParanoidOne 13:33, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
So that's how it works. Another thing learned. :) Tnx for all the help. Garion96 (talk) 13:36, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Parameter to hide stub templates

There's a discussion on WP:STUB about the idea of having a parameter to hide a stub templates, but still have the page added to the category; with the idea that it could be useful for pages that have multiple stub tags. Any additional input there would be great. Mairi 08:20, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Stub images

[2] Developer Jamesday has requested that images only be used for content, not decoration. The reason for this is that images cause a major server load problem; the actual size of the image is not really relevant. Hence, please remove images from stub templates, and use formatted or colored text instead. Radiant_>|< 11:17, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

sad. I thought that had been fixed when we went to MW1.5. Grutness...wha? 11:37, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
I question the benefits of this. The same logic could be applied to images in those 'this page is part of WikiProject whatever' banners (and 'Featured Article' banners and so forth) that are added to talk pages, , the keyhole image on all portal links, the new help page format with little icons, et cetera. We use alot of images. I think the problem is when they are all concentrated together on a page you get a big server spike. Stub templates are only ever going to add one additional image to the page each... if it is in several stub-categories maybe two or three total. I think we should try to set a limit on 'how many images per page' rather than removing images in general. Note - I agree with you about the userboxes even though that is likely to be much more contentious... they are also clearly much more of a problem with some pages having hundreds of userbox based images. --CBD ☎ ✉ 13:25, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
  • I have already made the request of userboxes, and removed the image from a few maintenance templates. I realize that each individual stub template is only a drop in the bucket, but there are a lot of drops - and there isn't really a practical reason why stub templates should have an image, other than that they look cute. You are of course welcome to contact the devs if you wish to make a feature request to limit the amount of images loaded for any page, but that seems a bit impractical to me. Radiant_>|< 15:14, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
That's not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting that we ignore the drops and concentrate on the gallons. If a particular template has an image in it, but isn't going to be viewed frequently / combined with other image bearing templates frequently then why make a big deal out of it? Before going after every little template which has an image on it and getting into a huge brouhaha let's look at the big problems first... userboxes with images and especially people who have hundreds of them on their page, 'image archives' on user or Wikiproject pages (does the 'gallery' tag make those ok or still a problem?), those little 'flag' images where you've got one for every country and they show up on userpages for each country visited or list articles for the country of every person listed, et cetera. Taking out the 'top ten' of those is likely going to accomplish more than wiping out all the other 'extra' images combined. I'm not suggesting a dev feature change... just consideration of how a particular image bearing template is used and thus whether it is likely to be a 'drop' (images on stub templates) or a 'deluge' (images on userboxes). Getting rid of the 'deluge' items makes sense. I don't think that going after every little 'drop' does. Yes, every image causes server load... but so do templates in general, wiki-markup, et cetera. An occasional image here and there for 'presentation' purposes isn't killing the servers. --CBD ☎ ✉ 15:38, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I also fund that Stub images are quite crucial in distinguishing between the templates at a glance (much like the Talk Page orange boxes). That alone is a pertinent argument against their removal,I think. The flag pictures (which are also in several cases meta-templates) are also likely to be much worse offenders than stub icons. I distinctly recallsome images being unlinkedfromtemplates last years because they a serious server strain. The flag of canada was a serious offender. Simply subdividing the icons shared by several templates would be a very simple way to reduce server impact. Circeus 15:56, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

I for one am heavily dependent on the little image / flag when I'm sorting stubs. In short: if I see the image I expect to see in the bottom of the page, I just move on to the next article. This saves me a lot of time. If I always had to read the stub text my work would take a lot longer. I know this might be a trivial point, but it is relevant to me. One more reason for keeping them: Many stub articles look incredibly dull with no images or whatever on the page. I find it nice with at least one tiny image to give a litte colour. I don't believe this should be killing the servers any more than loading the Wikipedia logo. Seeing e.g. a small image of Einstein has often inspired me to look into the category and read a few more articles about physics. We should focus on the big sinners, e.g. image galleries or articles with 8-10 images. If - after that - we still have problems, then we can kill the little stub images. --Valentinian 22:16, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
i agree. the images make it far quicker to sort for the right stubs. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 02:50, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Heh. Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Questions_re_server_load_from_images_in_userspace. Brion seems to think quite different than Jamesday. -- grm_wnr Esc 04:20, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Using popups to see stub tags

Hi. I thought this javascript snippet may interest people here. When using popups, it lets you see the stub templates that are being used on the page. Lupin|talk|popups 17:15, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Speedy deletion crtiteria inconsistency

See here for an embryonic discussion on a large hole in our "speedy" criteria, in that what we have on the SFD is inconsistent with what's listing on WP:CSD, and neither is useful for ever actually deleting well-formed but never-used stub types. If I get no further comments, I'll fix the former for consistency, and leave the latter alone, in its splendid pointlessness. Alai 08:26, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I've asked for some clarification on this here; I would much appreciate any input from this project. (Not copying the actual questions to avoid fragmenting the discussion). —Kirill Lokshin 22:03, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

  • There seems to be an effort to modify stub tags to rid them of references to wikiprojects. In particular the Canberra wikiproject stubtags have been modified several times recently by Users Freakofnurture, Jerzy, and Carnildo. They have not discussed their edits prior to making them. They have not referred to any policy or guideline. Their edits refer to "wikispam".
There has been some attempt to have a discussion at Template talk:Canberra-geo-stub and at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Canberra#template edit. The discussion would appear to support such footers as per Wikipedia:WikiProject best practices#How to attract contributors .28Advertise.21.29.--A Y Arktos 04:10, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
User:Jerzy/WikiProj-soliciting stub templates and associated discussions at User_talk:Freakofnurture#Project-spam via stub tags, User_talk:Carnildo#Project-spam via stub tags shed some light that they are working together but not what guideline or policy they are following, nor where they sought or obtained concensus for their campaign. More discussion at User_talk:Jerzy#Comic stub templates, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Comics/templates#W-Proj refs in Stub tags, Template talk:Marvel-Comics-stub
User Grutness suggested at Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians's notice board#Wikiproject spam links? that the discussion be referred here.
Through the page referenced above by User:Kirill Lokshin, I see that User:Carnildo states at Wikipedia talk:Stub#WikiProject links in stub templates that he sees "nothing wrong with placing a link to a project's article guidelines in a stub template, since that's useful information to someone working to expand an article. Placing a link to the project's main page is another matter: it gives no useful information to the casual editor, while giving the impression of article ownership, or with some wordings, the impression that the WikiProject is more important than Wikipedia as a whole." His edits ahve not been in line with this comment as he has made no attempt to engage with the projects which link to the templates he is modifying, nor has he suggested a more effective linking strategy anywhere else.
Any views as to policy or guidleines on project links; particularly with reference to Wikipedia:WikiProject best practices#How to attract contributors .28Advertise.21.29?--A Y Arktos 07:19, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Stub list problem?

I cannot seem to successfully follow the link the the stub list, which I use a lot for cleanup. Has it been moved, or is there a technical problem? SailorfromNH 18:38, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

strange - works for me, and it's still at {WP:WSS/ST]]. There were server troubles a few hours ago, but I don't see that that would cause it. Grutness...wha? 02:14, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

New template

I've created a new template: {{verylargestub}}, to be placed instead of {{verylarge}} at the top of stub categories. {{Verylarge}} is okay in genmeral terms but has one bad flaw for stub categories - it suggests thinking about making subcategories and discussing them in the category's talk page. Which means, of course, that we don't find out about the discussions at WP:WSS until the subcategories are made. {{Verylargestub}} still suggests thinking about making subcategories, but directs the editor to WP:WSS/P rather than category talk. Please replace {{verylarge}} with {{verylargestub}} if you see it on a stub category! Perhaps this could be done by bot...? Before that's done, though - I've left the same category on the new template (Category:Overpopulated categories) - perhaps this needs a separate category. Grutness...wha? 05:52, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like a good plan. Are we aiming to have these on all of the 90-odd oversizeds? Alai 05:55, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
probably a good idea - certainly any which ise {{verylarge}} should have that replaced with the new template. Grutness...wha? 05:58, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Crime-stub and BDSM-stub

I've just noticed - both {{crime-stub}} and {{BDSM-stub}} use handcuffs as their symbol (OK, crime-stub actually uses legirons, but they look like handcuffs, and are used for the same purpose). Surely either or both could be changed to avoid confusion, and, erm, unwanted connotations? JIP | Talk 12:57, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

perhaps changing one to a burglar's mask (oh, but which one? ;). What about changing the crime one to the jail bars as used on prison-stub? Would that do the trick? Grutness...wha? 22:45, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

call to arms

Category:Stubs is starting to creep up in size again - it's just breached the 200 barrier. Any volunteers to go in with rakes and brooms? Grutness...wha? 23:44, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Category:Stub templates

This whole hierarchy seems rather pointless, duplicative, and contrary to the scope of Category:Wikipedia templates, where it's ended up. Off to CFD with 'em all? Alai 01:07, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

IIRC the general rule on Wikipedia seems to be category or list. We have a list - WP:WSS/ST. This seems redundant. Also see my comments at WP:SFD re: Film-genre-stub. Grutness...wha? 04:56, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

I've listed them at Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Log/2006_March_1#Category:Stub_templates. I'm amazed at the number of stub templates that've had this noinclude-spam added to them. I'm less amazed no-one bothered mentioning it to us... Alai 00:05, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Heirarchy Issues

So It seems that there are many issues with stub types being children of many other stub types... Is there a reason behind this? For example Christianity Biography is from generic Stub, Christian people, Christianity stubs, and Religious biography stubs. Are not Christian people already stubs under christianity stubs and do we need all this major spiderwebbing of stub categories? Just a bit confusing for me... Jabencarsey 01:39, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Look at it this way. Which is better - to have a Category:Christianity stubs containing 200 stubs and also with five subcategories for Christian people, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, Saints, Popes, and Christian texts, each containing 200 stubs, or to just have one main category containing 1500 stubs? Which is easier for editors who know about one aspect of Christianity? The main aim of the hierarchy is to make sure that categories are a useful size for editors who know about a specific area or topic - not so large and general that they'll have to pick through hundreds of stubs they know nothing about, and not so small that a dedicated editor could clear it in a couple of days. For that reason, WP:WSS has got this hierarchy with loads of categories, each of which - ideally - should have between about 60 and 600 articles. It also helps the hardware side of Wikipedia, since templates used on thousands of articles can slow down the servers. Grutness...wha? 04:52, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree with what you said and I think that maybe i didnt explain what I was asking very well... I was talking about the categories themselves being part of too many other categories. I am aboslutely for making more managable categories. Basically I think the categories themselves need to be better categorized. Does that make any more sense? Jabencarsey 19:36, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

ah, right. yeah, I see what you mean. it's not something we've thought too much about, really. The main reason for them being subcategorised in so many places is also to make it easier for editors to find them - it doesn't mean much difficulty as far as sifting through categories is concerned, but i does make this list a bit heavy-going. We've tried to simplify the tree a little bit from time to time, but it is a problem. It may well be that the whole page will need a thorough re-vamping sometime fairly soon (when it was first made, there were only about 100 stub tyes - there are now about 1500), but unless someone comes up with a good plan for how to do that... Grutness...wha? 23:14, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

In the case you mention, the only questionable supercat seems to be Category:Stub categories, which is essentially redundant, as Category:Religion stubs are included in it already, and it's a descendant of that. Do we actually need a 'flat category' with all the stub types, rather than only the top-level ones? This is not unlike the question I raise above with Category:Stub templates. But the others all seem logically necessary, orthogonal, and irredundant: we have one corresponding permanent category, plus two stub parents on different axes. Alai 15:43, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

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