Wikipedia talk:Stub/Archive 4

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

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The color of stubs

I think we need to change to the colour of stubs. Blank articles are red, full articles are blue, stubs should be yellow or brown or something; featured articles can be in somekind of elite green color. what do you think? Col Our 12:20, 15 January 2006 (UTC-5)

You can already do something like this with the Misc preference "Threshold for stub display". I find 800 is a good number to set it to to highlight obviously short articles. It colours based on article size, not whether they are tagged as stubs, but it's close. --Scott Davis ^Talk 03:51, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

I am not a member, to set perference I have to be a member. I think wikipedia should be for the general public. I really think some stubs should have different color. If I clicked on a stub and it doesn't tell me much; I wouldn't have clicked on in the first place. I'll just research it on google (though I'll be sure to add infomation to the stub from 'google' if I have the time or feel like it.)As for the coloring of featured articles a different colour, I would be more inclined to click on featured articles links in an article, if I knew it was a feature article (and vis versa for stubs). Different colours would allow readers and editors to better know which ones to avoid, work on or click on. Doesn't registering take up valuable wikipedia memory room? I also think wikeypeedia should have a spell check for the search, spell checking something via google takes time and should be unnecessary. (I am sure we could copy the gramma check from microsoft word without infringing copyright laws, hehe, if it does we could just ask Bill) Col Our 10:27, 16 January 2006 (UTC-5)

If you have a username you are a member. But I agree that member's only systems are often inadequate as a huge majority of members are not registered. But I think that having three colours of text is distracting enough as it is, so I don;t support a change in this case. Carina22 22:11, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Col Our that it would be nice to have a different (and unified) colour for stubs. More colours create more distraction, but the information that a link does not lead to a full article seems to me to be valuable to readers as well as potential authors. --Daranios 17:27, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Usefulness of multiple stub tags

I have a few times added quality markers to articles, but was reverted with the message that material intended for editors, such as notes of the article being a Featured Article, should only be put on the talk page.

However, with stub-tags the situation is obviously a different one. Perhaps it is just the status quo that makes it eligible to put three or four stub-tags on an article? In an article such as Adolf Fredrikskyrkan, I question whether all the stub tags are indeed useful for the reader.

Fred-Chess 13:08, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Three or four stub tags on an article is definitely not good for the reader. It's very irritating- enough that some people tend to go on sprees of simply removing all but one from the article, which is unfortunate, as then they lose categorization. I think it should be set as a rule that an article should only ever have one visible stub template, with any other applicable types as categories only. -- Jake 21:26, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Multiple stub tags are useful for readers because they help editors to find articles and improve them. They only show up at the bottom of articles, so they aren't getting in the way of anything. Kappa 21:36, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

How does it help editors find the articles more easily than the category alone? And a fairly large number of people have commented that they find numerous stub tags very irritating and visually unappealing. What benefit does the second, third, or fourth tag give over just adding categories for those? -- Jake 21:43, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure it's good practice to add stub categories without the corresponding stub template, as it adds to maintenance, and increases the chances that the category might be left in place accidentally even after the article itself is destubbed. I don't think we should mix manual and automatic (via template) category population. – Seancdaug 04:16, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

That definitely is a problem; I have run across articles that had stub categories added directly that shouldn't have been there anymore. Maybe if there was some way of doing {{bio-stub|hide}} for ones after the second or so, such that it added the article to the category but didn't display anything? --Mairi 04:27, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

That'd be a good fix, it is (or if it were to become) technically feasible. In theory this would keep everyone happy (he said, hedging through long experience of disappointment of such expectations), as it'd prevent both "under-categorisation" and "over-tagging". I hadn't thought of making it a template parameter, that's worth a go -- though of course it'd then mean recoding every existing stub template... Alai 04:42, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I got it to work with {{whatever-stub|hidden}} instead (there ought to be some way similar to the if templates (but without using one of them directly) so that the exact text doesn't matter, but I can't figure out how). It's a relatively minor coding change, just adding {{{1|}}}Structure to the class part of the div tag. (See User:Mairi/Demonstration-stub.) Changing every existing template would be a pain, but it'd be doable -- probably by bot. --Mairi 06:08, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm impressed, I didn't know there was a parametric default mechanism in wiki markup. *makes 'we're not worthy' obeisance to Mairi* It seems like an entirely good idea, then. I'd suggest floating the idea as widely, and trialing as gently, as is possible, in anticipation of the next round of flames asserting we're all OCDish/trolls/WP:OWNers, etc, etc. Alai 17:51, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Don't forget to throw the word cabal in there somewhere. ;) --TheParanoidOne 22:22, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

facepalm* My bad on that. Alai 02:38, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Hey, nice work! If we can get that in the stub templates across the board, that would help a lot. Probably best to put it in metastub first and make sure it gets in any new templates for certain, then apply it to existing templates (might be handy to make sure they're all 100% standardized too while doing so)... would want to run it past the majority of WP:WSS before going ahead with the mass change, of course, but I don't see that as a problem. -- Jake 07:40, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I'd tentatively support this, although the word "metastub" does make me wonder whether we'll be back to the "don't use metatemplates" row. I'm also a little concerned because you find stub templates on articles in all sorts of unlikely places. It often takes a bit of hunting to find where a stub template is in an article - remove the stub message and it makes it harder still, especially when (in one case I dealt with a couple of days ago), an article was in three different stub categories, with templates in three different places in the article! I have one final nagging question, too - how would we stop people from hiding all the stub templates (which would definitely NOT be desirable)? Is there some way of rigging the parameters to ensure that one template is automatically shown, even if all of them say "hidden"? Grutness...wha? 11:54, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

1. "metastub" I referred to is an existing template used to create a new stub template. It's described in the "Creating the stub template" section of WP:STUB. 2. Except for section-stub, which should never be hidden, stubs should always be at the bottom of the article, after everything except categories and interlanguage links (and the persondata commented section, where it exists). When people put them elsewhere, that's already something being done wrong, no new ruling is needed there. 3. If people add the |hidden parameter to all the stub notices... change one back? It's not feasible to make one template automatically be shown. It might be possible, but complex template work like that is bad for the servers. -- Jake 21:16, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

1, ok, point taken, I misunderstood originally. 2, that doesn't answer the question. At the moment, you can easily tell where the stub templates are because that's where they appear in the text. If they're hidden, it will greatly slow down stub-sorting and removal work for those which are not correctly stubbed (and, from sorting them for a long time, I'd say that's around 20% of stub articles). As to 3, saying "change one back" doesn't help at all. As soon as it becomes obvious that stub templates can be hidden, there is a dedicated group of editors (I'm sure everyone at WSS will be able to name several of them) who will systematically go around deliberately hiding every stub template they can. unless there is some practical way to ensure that one stub template will not be hidden in every multi-stubbed article, then I am pretty firmly against the idea. WSS will have a full-time job in its hands reverting hidden stubs, where it should be busy sorting stubs. Grutness...wha? 02:55, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

I'd be surprised if this were to be a major problem in practice. This is exactly the situation with categories anyway, and I haven't heard many (well, any!) complaints about it being excessively difficult; and stubs being stubs, it's generally not going to be that hard. If all else fails, fire up a browser with a searchable edit box. Suggestions for methods of remonstration with anyone who hides a stub-tag in the middle of a 5,000 word article gratefully accepted. (Or see Mairi's comment below about "unhiding" such stub-tags.) Alai 04:19, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

I've mentioned it on the talk of WP:WSS; it might be worth mentioning it on the Village Pump as it could affect plenty of people. The concerns about stubs being in odd places and preventing people from hiding all stub template are reasonable. I don't know of any good code solution to always show the first template (althought it's possible one exists), other than what Jake said. It'd also be possible for an individual logged-in user to have all [well-formed] stubs always displayed, regardless of whether they're marked hidden or not (see my monobook.css). Similarly, a user could decide to always hide stub templates, if they don't care about them at all (which they could do at present anyway). Mairi 04:53, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

That might be overkill, but one suspects that if you don't, the Usual Suspects will yelp about it. (Come to that, they'll probably yelp anyway.) AFAICS, the issues are:

Should we change any stubs, and/or the metastub template, to facilitate making this technically possible in the first place;
Should the guidelines be changed to suggest a change in usage of the hidden parameter;
Does this then have implication for the 'don't use more than two templates' advice.

The first of these seems relatively harmless to me, and the second two a positively good idea. Alai 22:24, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Incidentally, it would be straightforward to produce some simple stats from the db dumps of "heavily stubbed" articles. Or indeed lists of the offending articles themselves. I don't want to alarm anyone, but we could probably pretty safely start with articles with six stub types (i.e., more than some stub types have articles...). Some of these may be sheer excess (marginal categories applied, or redundant supecats), but equally some might be suitable substrates for hidden stub templates... Alai 06:31, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject links in stub templates

What's the general policy on having links to WikiProjects in stub tags? Carnildo has removed them from a number of stubs, citing what he considers to be inappropriate advertising and claims of article ownership; but since nobody else had ever complained, I'm curious about what the general consensus on such links is. —Kirill Lok s hin 21:59, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

I tend to stick to the project tags that are put on talk pages because one article could easily fall under several projects (the same way that it could be listed under several stub types); for example, Wisconsin and Southern Railroad has both {{TrainsWikiProject}} and {{WikiProject Wisconsin}} on the talk page. I've seen others that have three project banners on the talk page. We try to limit the number of stub templates on an article to two, but there is no limit imposed on the talk page banners. Slambo (Speak) 17:45, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

I see 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. --Carnildo 08:29, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

What if the article guidelines are on the project's main page? ;-) —Kirill Lok s hin 16:58, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Then link to the appropriate section. --Carnildo 22:16, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough. Is there some particular wording you think would be best? —Kirill Lok s hin 22:38, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

I can't find any specific examples, but {{MEP-stub}} has a good example of how to provide resources for expanding an article, and {{Colombia-geo-stub}}'s wording would be good if the WikiProject actually had something on their project page. --Carnildo 10:02, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! —Kirill Lok s hin 14:22, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

You are creating yourt own POV policy against consensus. The intention of linking to wikiproject pages in stubs is to encourage collaboration across a range of related topics. Suddenly deciding this is bad is an opinion you are welcome to share, but who gave you the right to make it policy? Garglebutt / (talk) 02:51, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I resent Carnildo continuing to remove these links and pointing to the discussion here as proof of consensus, when it is obviously no such thing. I see no harm in the wikiproject links, when the whole stub template itself is a self reference. --Martyman-(talk)

Just a note of agreement with User:Garglebutt and User:Martyman - SoM 02:56, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

All the above is true... I've confronted him and reverted on this before, and he still keeps doing it... plus the fact that the road WP pages have the article specifications on them. If it was external "advertising" I would be against it, but it is internal "advertising" encouraging others to help with the WikiProjects. What is the problem with that? See {{Kentucky-road-stub}} 's history for an example. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 02:59, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I am moving discussion on this issue to Wikipedia:Village pump (policy). Garglebutt / (talk) 05:42, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Can't we all just agree that Wikiprojects can be valuable resources, and that linking to a relevant one is good- but linking to a Wikiproject's guidelines on writing a good article is even better? --maru (talk) contribs 05:35, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

UK Geo-stub emblems

I recently made the mistake of altering emblems on a number of UK geo-stubs, for instance, Template:Berkshire-geo-stub, Template:Dorset-geo-stub, Template:Manchester-geo-stub.

I was informed of the error of my ways at User_talk:Lozleader#Geo-stubs and these are mostly reverted, and the images listed for deletion.

I have since come across the following statement atWikipedia:Stub#Creating_the_stub_template:

"Wikipedia policy is that fair use images are not to be used in any templates and that of course includes stub templates."

As most of the images use the coatofarms copyright tag they are fair use - should they not be taken off the stubs?

(As I have stated before, my own opinion is that the arms of modern local authorities are not appropriate as they are not the "county arms" and are sometimes anchronistic, but I accept the rulings made earlier).

Better to have no images at all?

Lozleader 12:40, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Coding of {{metastub}}

This was earlier today changed to:

<div class="notice metadata" id="stub" style="clear:both;">''This {{{article}}} is a [[Wikipedia:Stub|stub]]. You can [[Wikipedia:Stub|help]] Wikipedia by [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} expanding it]''.</div><includeonly>[[Category:{{{category}}} stubs]]</includeonly>

The noinclude seems to be against what's been decided in the past; I've removed it. Coding of some actual stub templates does seem to be getting more "exotic", though: noinclude is common, and sometimes mini-essays in includeonly -- and lots and lots of "stub template categories", which I've put on CFD (their parent is already gone). The rest I dunno about, but clearly it needs to synch up with the discussion on this page, one way or another. Alai 23:11, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Whatever you decide, {{metastub}}, {{stub}} and the tempate on the project page should be synchronized with each other because all are cited as templates for stub creation.--TheFarix (Talk) 00:47, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

What's smaller than a stub but bigger than a bad article idea?

Sounds like a setup for a punchline. I wish I had one! What I'm asking is, WP:STUB states "In general, [a stub] must be long enough to at least define the article's title, which generally means 3 to 10 short sentences." WP:BAI states a bad article idea is "Anything which you cannot be bothered to write one complete sentence about." What then is an article of one or two sentences classified as, or isn't there a formal name for them?

Other things on the project page that aren't stubs but don't seem to be defined are "a short article on a topic of narrow scope" and "An article that can be improved by only a rather knowledgeable editor, or after significant research." What are they? Thanks, Esquizombi 09:23, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

I guess they had been called "substubs," but now there's no name or policy on them...? Wikipedia talk:Substub. Esquizombi 05:04, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Both of the above are "only" guidelines, of course, so "must" should really be "should". I suppose a one or two sentence article is "shorter than is desirable", but not quite "bad" enough to be formally deprecated. Essentially substubs were removed as there was no separate "action plan" for them; substubhood was never grounds for deletion, etc, and it was counterproductive to have a separate substub category, as it tended to become big enough to require sorting itself, thereby potentially leading to parallel "stub-sorting" and "substub-sorting", double-handling in movement between the two, etc.

The other things are to deal with the case of "small articles on small topics", as opposed to clearly incomplete articles on more substantial ones. I tend to work on the presumption that if an article is of "stub length", but is difficult to significantly expand, it's probably a merger candidate. Alai 18:01, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

I have been accused of writing "Microstubs" when I create articles which I intend to go back and expand greatly. From where I access www it is very tempermental .... Garrie 04:43, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Stub identification bot

Does anyone know if there is a bot that can detect (or suggest) that an article is of stub length? I imagine it would be human-assissted in some way. If there is such a bot, a link to it would be helpful.

Feature request: Random stub

Who/how does one ask to have a Special Page created? It'd be awsome if there was a special page that'd take you to a randomly selected stub. I don't want to crawl through the inordinate amount of interrelated categories to find something to work on. Most users probably have something of value to add to ~20-25% of all stubs, and could just click through the random link generator 4 or 5 times to find one. Mrzaius 16:06, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

The idea sounds pretty good. Village pump (technical) might be a more suitable place to talk baout it, though. --TheParanoidOne 17:16, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Done. Also, submitted to Bugzilla. http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5589 Thanks for the pointer. Mrzaius 21:27, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

You could achieve pretty much the same thing by just browsing the stub list, clicking randomly, then clicking a random article in the category. The other advantage is you can work on stubs in your favourite field. Stevage 22:57, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Actually, the main advantage to a random-stub special page would be that it would bypass the catagorization. Many individual contributors can contribute to many categories. This would also help with uncategorized or miscategorized content. Beyond that, it's just nice to be able to click a link and, bam, be taken to a page you've never seen before. However, unlike with SpecialPages:Random Page, all pages linked to under Random Stub need work. Think of it as a working man's Random Page link. Mrzaius 15:09, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

The Village Pump mention has timed out, but the issue still stands. Any idea how best to take care of this? I'd be happy to help, if it were possible to do this within the wiki rather than having to hack the wikimedia code. MrZaius^talk 21:40, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Many stubs ARE articles

I've made a few changes as I couldn't recognise this as a desciption of reality. There are vast numbers of stubs which are perfectly good articles, often longer than the article on the same article in other encyclopedia and longer than the average article in either Britannica or Wikipedia. "Stub" is effectively a form of expansion request and I think that people are so slow to remove them that the number of them is out of control and the range of articles which carry the tag bears no relation to what the page said when I found it. ReeseM 03:16, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

So fix it. Just H 04:17, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

I was going to post this as a separate question, but it's essentially the same point as the above: In traditional encyclopedias, there are often very short entries. These signify that the subject is of sufficient importance to warrant an article, but just a short one. Translating this to Wiki: wouldn't it more sense not to just label all short articles as Stubs, but only those that manisfestly warrant longer articles, or the community decides warrant longer articles? PaulLev 21:32, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

You'd probably have a better chance of telling the stock market to go one way or another at this point. Wikipedians are just gonna do whatever they want to do for the most part in regards to growing articles or not. Subjects that people are interested in will be huge, subjects not interesting to people will be tiny. Just H 04:19, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

In some cases: (1) there is only a small amount of knowledge about a subject, (2) no additional knowledge is expected to come to light, and (3) it is still worth having as an article e.g. because it is part of a sequence - for instance Zechariah of Israel, one of the kings of ancient Israel. When those conditions are met then (a) it should never be deleted, and (b) it will never be expanded either. Conclusion: it's not a stub, just a permanently short article. Would I be on safe grounds to remove stub markers in such cases? Fayenatic london 20:01, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

"Permanently" is a very long time... It's certainly true to say that the two definitions of a stub in the guideline -- length and prospects for expansion -- are far from equivalent. It's also the case that the first, length, is the much more easily and objectively applied, while the second requires a certain amount of "crystal balling". I must admit I find the idea of a "permanent three sentence article" somewhat unappealing, and I'm very much inclined to leave them tagged as stubs as an indication of that, whether or not expansion is immediately in prospect. Merger or other refactoring are other alternatives, which I'd personally favour whenever those are feasible (which isn't to say I'd get into an edit war about it, especially if it was an area I was just sorting stubs in, rather than knowing much about). If you're planning on doing this, I'd suggest that: you only do this if you're very sure that expansion is effectively impossible; that you've considered merging or restructuring, and it isn't feasible; and those things considered, if you do it anyway, add a comment to the wiki source noting that the article is "deliberately left unstubbed". Otherwise I can see a lot of unnecessary back and forth when some other editor comes along later, and in all innocence decides it's "obviously" a stub, due to being so short, and re-tags it. (Rinse and repeat.) Ideally, make sure there's some sort of consensus among the editors on a particular topic on "what is or isn't a stub" in that area... Alai 05:49, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Take as an example the article Anacletus or Pope Sisinnius. As is common with many of the early popes there is very little detail. In fact my primary source book on the popes (*Richard P. McBrien, Lives of the Popes (Harper, 2000). ISBN 0-06-065304-3) contains 7 lines on Sisinnius and the Catholic Encylopaedia has 6 lines. Therefore these articles are very unlikely (barring some major archaeological find) to progress beyond what they currently contain. Those editors who lack domain knowledge or are overly zealous may well mark these zs stubs or Rc stubs or bio stubs. I would like to propose a tag for short articles. The idea is that shorter articles (stub and start sizes) which are nonetheless complete could be tagged with this as a way of avoiding inappropriate stub markings. These could be monitored to ensure against inappropriate use of the tag. �The preceding unsigned comment was added by Loyola (talk � contribs) 06:52, 22 January 2007 (UTC).

If you have a look elsewhere on this page, you will see that this area is one of the most problematic in dealing with stubs. What constitutes the best an article can be is often a fairly arbitrary decision, and as long as there are two definitions for stubs (short/expandable) this will repeatedly crop up. But both definitions are needed for stubbing to work successfully. Sure, there are articles that are short yet as complete as they can be (see Wikipedia_talk:Stub#Stub?); Similarly, there are reasonably long articles which can still be regarded as stubs (see Wikipedia_talk:Stub#at what point is a stub no longer a stub?). This is the reason why we shy away from only using length as a criterion. The only real solution is to remove stub templates in those cases where the article has gone as far as it can, and add a  on the bottom of the article expaining why it isn't a stub. Grutness...wha? 07:38, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Which Stub?

I recently created an article on Customs racketeering, but am wondering which stub to mark it with. Temporarilly I put the Law and Politics stub on it, but I have a strong feeling thats the wrong stub. Could somebody look over the article and tell me which stub to use? I'd like any responses to be posted on my user page as I often forget where this page is. Thanks! Socom49 16:09, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Worse comes to worse, you can always put {{stub}} on there. Somebody will come along to make it more specific, although there's a list on the Stub Sorting Project. Just H 04:20, 28 December 2006 (UTC)