[WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
Stubs and how to handle them seem to be controversial still (or again), which is rather surprising given that we have been going nearly a decade now. I'd like to ask how many articles still are stubs, by some sensible standard? Points arise from that, clearly. But I'm hearing quite a lot recently from the glass half empty people. You know, ten short stubs are created, and a year later five are still stubby, five are much improved. Are we glad to have five new substantial articles, or embarrassed to have persistent five stubs? So has this made things proportionately better or worse? Discuss. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 5:46 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 29 November 2010 17:33, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Points arise from that, clearly. But I'm hearing quite a lot recently from the glass half empty people. You know, ten short stubs are created, and a year later five are still stubby, five are much improved. Are we glad to have five new substantial articles, or embarrassed to have persistent five stubs? So has this made things proportionately better or worse? Discuss. Wikipedia is a work in progress, despite a certain proportion of editors always having been uncomfortable with this being apparent, and a stub is frequently more informative to the reader than nothing. But some data, like Charles is asking for, is not an unreasonable request. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
Short answer: I think we have made a step in the right direction by getting five decently-expanded articles as a result of ten stubs. However, what about the ones that cannot be expanded? That leads to my long answer below: It depends on the expandability of the remaining stubs. Are they able to be expanded via reliable sources to a decently-sized encyclopedia article? One thing I have observed about the creation of stubs (besides from newcomers, which normally they are hit or miss on expandability due to their relative lack of experience with WP or with wikis in general), this is assumption or even prediction that 'they can possibly be expanded' or 'they might be some sources out there'. I would generally find such a premise behind stub-creation as unsatisfactory content creation/expansion; however, I come from a belief that Wikipedia's focus should be on the amount of raw, sourced content as opposed to the raw number of articles that can be created. To put in a more concrete way, any given Wikipedia article is not precisely '1 unit of knowledge' (Google Knol can sue me later for ripping off their terminology); that is, our article on Abraham Lincoln contains much more verifiable information than, say, Venezuela at the 2010 Pan American Games. -MuZemike On 11/29/2010 11:33 AM, Charles Matthews wrote: Stubs and how to handle them seem to be controversial still (or again), which is rather surprising given that we have been going nearly a decade now. I'd like to ask how many articles still are stubs, by some sensible standard? Points arise from that, clearly. But I'm hearing quite a lot recently from the glass half empty people. You know, ten short stubs are created, and a year later five are still stubby, five are much improved. Are we glad to have five new substantial articles, or embarrassed to have persistent five stubs? So has this made things proportionately better or worse? Discuss. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
On 29/11/2010 17:59, MuZemike wrote: Short answer: I think we have made a step in the right direction by getting five decently-expanded articles as a result of ten stubs. That's my answer also. However, what about the ones that cannot be expanded? That leads to my long answer below: It depends on the expandability of the remaining stubs. Are they able to be expanded via reliable sources to a decently-sized encyclopedia article? Well, let's assume for the purposes of this argument that in principle they can be. If not, they can be deleted, preferably via PROD in case some more sources come along. One thing I have observed about the creation of stubs (besides from newcomers, which normally they are hit or miss on expandability due to their relative lack of experience with WP or with wikis in general), this is assumption or even prediction that 'they can possibly be expanded' or 'they might be some sources out there'. I would generally find such a premise behind stub-creation as unsatisfactory content creation/expansion; however, I come from a belief that Wikipedia's focus should be on the amount of raw, sourced content as opposed to the raw number of articles that can be created. To put in a more concrete way, any given Wikipedia article is not precisely '1 unit of knowledge' (Google Knol can sue me later for ripping off their terminology); that is, our article on Abraham Lincoln contains much more verifiable information than, say, Venezuela at the 2010 Pan American Games. I find something to agree with here, given that one of my hobbyhorses is that WP is hypertext, however much the current recognition is of authors of *articles*. The presentation of facts is less significant in the end than their presence on the site, in a place where they can be found. I would, however, still welcome an answer to the original question. There is a certain distribution of sizes of articles, and a certain more notional distribution of completeness percentages - the article on Abe is going to be how complete compared with a 600 page biography? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
On 29 November 2010 17:33, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Stubs and how to handle them seem to be controversial still (or again), which is rather surprising given that we have been going nearly a decade now. I'd like to ask how many articles still are stubs, by some sensible standard? Currently, 73% of enwp articles have some form of quality assessment. 13% have the infrastructure for assessment - talkpage templates - but no rating as yet; the remaining 14% are entirely unknown to the assessment system. Of the assessed articles, two thirds are rated as stubs. However, there's a massive great caveat to that: an awful lot of them aren't. Based on my experience, I'd say anything from a quarter to a half of the stub articles are not, by any reasonable definition, stubs. It's not uncommon now to see a multiple-paragraph article with an infobox, image and external links - lacking in many aspects of its coverage, no doubt, but a nontrivial amount of content - labelled as a stub. There's three factors at work here. a) Redefinition: As our standards grow higher, stub gets repurposed as a catch-all term for very low-quality article b) Lag: articles being marked as stubs, then expanding, but the tag not being removed (or removed from the talkpage and not from the rating template). c) Drift: people see the articles marked as stub in a) and b), and assume this is what one should be like, so grade accordingly. Overall, using the traditional definition of short placeholder article providing a basic degree of context, the sort of thing you might perhaps find in a concise reference work - I'd say ~50% of our articles. I *think* the proportion of stubs created now is less than the proportion created in, say, 2006, but I don't have much evidence to back that up. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
Absolutely agree. There are a lot of articles that are not assessed (though, for all intents and purposes, WikiProject assessments are not exactly the same as stub-tagging on the actual article page itself) at all, as well as a lot of articles that are still stub-tagged and are in fact no longer stubs. We need to keep that in mind when assigning a number or percentage of stubs on en.wiki, as the numbers will most certainly be off. -MuZemike On 11/29/2010 1:15 PM, Andrew Gray wrote: On 29 November 2010 17:33, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: Stubs and how to handle them seem to be controversial still (or again), which is rather surprising given that we have been going nearly a decade now. I'd like to ask how many articles still are stubs, by some sensible standard? Currently, 73% of enwp articles have some form of quality assessment. 13% have the infrastructure for assessment - talkpage templates - but no rating as yet; the remaining 14% are entirely unknown to the assessment system. Of the assessed articles, two thirds are rated as stubs. However, there's a massive great caveat to that: an awful lot of them aren't. Based on my experience, I'd say anything from a quarter to a half of the stub articles are not, by any reasonable definition, stubs. It's not uncommon now to see a multiple-paragraph article with an infobox, image and external links - lacking in many aspects of its coverage, no doubt, but a nontrivial amount of content - labelled as a stub. There's three factors at work here. a) Redefinition: As our standards grow higher, stub gets repurposed as a catch-all term for very low-quality article b) Lag: articles being marked as stubs, then expanding, but the tag not being removed (or removed from the talkpage and not from the rating template). c) Drift: people see the articles marked as stub in a) and b), and assume this is what one should be like, so grade accordingly. Overall, using the traditional definition of short placeholder article providing a basic degree of context, the sort of thing you might perhaps find in a concise reference work - I'd say ~50% of our articles. I *think* the proportion of stubs created now is less than the proportion created in, say, 2006, but I don't have much evidence to back that up. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
On 29/11/2010 20:18, MuZemike wrote: Absolutely agree. There are a lot of articles that are not assessed (though, for all intents and purposes, WikiProject assessments are not exactly the same as stub-tagging on the actual article page itself) at all, as well as a lot of articles that are still stub-tagged and are in fact no longer stubs. We need to keep that in mind when assigning a number or percentage of stubs on en.wiki, as the numbers will most certainly be off. So does clicking Random Article and (gasp) judging for one's own self what is a stub produce a figure very different from 50%? Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
On 29 November 2010 20:42, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: So does clicking Random Article and (gasp) judging for one's own self what is a stub produce a figure very different from 50%? I hit random and immediately produced a category error :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanarce One prose sentence! But on the other hand, a demographic table, and a map, and an infobox, and some statistics, and a navbox. Stub or not stub? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
On 29 November 2010 20:50, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanarce One prose sentence! But on the other hand, a demographic table, and a map, and an infobox, and some statistics, and a navbox. Stub or not stub? At this point it may be useful to revive the term substub. - d. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: On 29 November 2010 20:42, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: So does clicking Random Article and (gasp) judging for one's own self what is a stub produce a figure very different from 50%? I hit random and immediately produced a category error :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanarce One prose sentence! But on the other hand, a demographic table, and a map, and an infobox, and some statistics, and a navbox. Stub or not stub? Stub. The picture is awful, for a start. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 9:37 PM, Carl (CBM) cbm.wikipe...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: Is it possible to have a breakdown of the high-end of that? i.e. Number of articles from 10,000 bytes upwards in steps of 5,000 bytes? Sure, I'll put a table below. snip Thanks! Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
And that's another problem that I am seeing more and more of. Call it simply being lazy, unable to write actual prose, or a combination thereof; but there are so many articles that get created that have only one (likely unsourced) sentence, a pretty infobox, a pretty navbox, a table, categories, and what other (stub) templates there. I would claim that infoboxes are the biggest culprit in that they are being substituted for actual prose. If an article creator only has one actual sentence of prose to put forth, that is not much, and I would claim sheer laziness in the article creator's part. Especially with these stubs on locations, when you cannot provide any more information on a location than what would normally be presented in an organized list or even an atlas or map, one wonders if writing about a location in the form of an encyclopedia article is the most efficient way to go. -MuZemike On 11/29/2010 2:50 PM, Andrew Gray wrote: On 29 November 2010 20:42, Charles Matthews charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com wrote: So does clicking Random Article and (gasp) judging for one's own self what is a stub produce a figure very different from 50%? I hit random and immediately produced a category error :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanarce One prose sentence! But on the other hand, a demographic table, and a map, and an infobox, and some statistics, and a navbox. Stub or not stub? ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] What proportion of articles are stubs?
On 30/11/2010 01:46, MuZemike wrote: And that's another problem that I am seeing more and more of. Call it simply being lazy, unable to write actual prose, or a combination thereof; but there are so many articles that get created that have only one (likely unsourced) sentence, a pretty infobox, a pretty navbox, a table, categories, and what other (stub) templates there. I would claim that infoboxes are the biggest culprit in that they are being substituted for actual prose. If an article creator only has one actual sentence of prose to put forth, that is not much, and I would claim sheer laziness in the article creator's part. Especially with these stubs on locations, when you cannot provide any more information on a location than what would normally be presented in an organized list or even an atlas or map, one wonders if writing about a location in the form of an encyclopedia article is the most efficient way to go. Yes, this brings us back to why I asked the question. We all have tastes in the matter, but what is on the site does reflect largely what content policy says. A verifiable short stub is not something to exclude, and Wikipedia (at least the English sort, and I think others too) has been founded on stubs that are later expanded. Is there a changing profile over time? Should there be? It seems clear that the concentration on GA and FA is not going to help upgrade most stubs; and there is no kudos to be had by serially improving stubs, except within the context of a WikiProject with a curatorial attitude. Gazetteer-like entries actually are not harmful. Infobox-only entries could end up forming a kind of penumbra round articles in prose: that could be more harmful. I see a number of directions in which people are working to make coverage more complete, in which the production of stubs is almost inevitable. Looked at in terms of people's tastes, there is no real debate to be had beyond I'd prefer you didn't. The first decade will be up in a few weeks, and it could be time to take stock. Charles ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
