Wikipedia talk:Stub/Archive 4

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: The color of stubs

message: 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)
thread_title:  UK Geo-stub emblems 

message: This was earlier today changed to:
:
This  is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by [ expanding it].Category: stubs
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)
replies: text: Whatever you decide, ,  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)
thread_title:  Coding of {{tl|metastub}} 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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. MrZaiustalk 21:40, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Feature request: Random stub

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

text: 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)

text: "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)

text: 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). ) 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)
thread_title: Many stubs ARE articles

message: 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)
replies: text: Worse comes to worse, you can always put  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)
thread_title: Which Stub?