User talk:Grutness/Croughton-London rule of stubs

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Should a single sentence stub be deleted without examining its context? I mean, is there a minimum criteria by which we can measure and say "this is an article, because it's more than 3 sentences or depends on 3 seperate context", and then say "hey, look this can never be an article because it's less than 3 sentences?". Once upon a time there was a concept called Wikipedia:Substub here in English Wikipedia, but even at those days, I had never heard anyone saying this. In a local Wikipedia edition, some people blattantly argue that no article under 3 sentences can ever be a stub and hence any such article should be speedily deleted. I argue that this is the violation of fifth pillar of Wikipedia becuase nobody can set an arbitrary and arguable "minimum entrance" criteria and being a stub is not related to size. Sadly, deletionist views are still proposed such as "English Wikipedia has its own rules, they don't account for us" and I'm really tired to deal with this subject. How can I complain on this issue on Meta or anywhere else? What is the appropriate complaint procedure on this?

Regards --Alperen (talk) 13:21, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Certainly not - a single sentence may still be a valid article in certain circumstances. To the best of my knowledge there has never been a rule which says that a one sentence article can be automatically deleted. As a stub-sorter of long standing, I've sorted many single-sentence stubs. I'm not sure where the best place to complain about this would be, though, other than to report the individual editors who are marking articles for speedying think that way to WP:AN/I nor somewhere similar. Grutness...wha? 22:18, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I assume that those certain circumstances contain situations where the information on the subject is already limited (like a biological species, an album, a rare movie, geographical location with encyclopedic value) which is probably already 2/3 of the stub content with rough estimation here, right? --Alperen (talk) 10:47, 27 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Very true - there's actually a template, {{Notstub}}, which is used for articles which can never get beyond stub length because so little is known about the subjects. But that's not the only reason a one sentence article can be a valid stub. As long as there is valid, encyclopedic content, and the subject is worthy of an article, even one sentence can be useful.

For instance, if the article on a town was one sentence long, it could still say something like this:

The city of New York is located at the mouth of the Hudson River in theUS state of New York, and has a population of 8.4 million.

That contains a lot of encyclopedic information - physical and political location, population - and makes it pretty clear that the subject is notable. In many cases, a one-sentence stub will be stuff which can be combined with a larger article (one sentence on the CEO of a company can be included into the article on the company, for instance), but even then, it would be a case of merging the information and turning it in into a redirect rather than deleteing it outright. Similarly there is sometimes a case for turning a load of one-sentence stubs on similar subjects into a list article. But theree are definitely one-sentence stubs which simply need to be expanded to a more reasonable length. Grutness...wha? 22:31, 27 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much. This clarifies the issue I think. Regards.--Alperen (talk) 09:15, 28 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think stubbing could be automated, if articles were tagged somehow in a way that indicates their importance. Included in that could also be a tag indicating any decision regarding notability. --Mathieu ottawa (talk) 17:08, 18 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Images, infoboxes, navigation templates, lists of examples, external links

Why do we want to exclude these from consideration of whether an article is a stub? The same information may be contained in a sentence. Does saying "Joe Bloggs is the Chief Executive" tell us anything more than an infobox with the same information? Or to say that Dover is on the South coast tell us more than a map? Surely we should judge an article as a whole? Rathfelder (talk) 09:38, 10 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]