Wikipedia talk:Stub sorting policy

message: The policy really needs to be decided.  Anyone have any ideas? -- AllyUnion (talk) 05:29, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

message: Voting closed on 31 Jan 2005, 23:59 (UTC)
====Only two stubs allowed, one on the main page, one on the talk page — votes:====
* -- AllyUnion (talk) 01:19, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Voting on a proposed policy for multiple stubs 

message: * -- AllyUnion (talk) 01:19, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Only two stubs allowed, one on the main page, one on the talk page &mdash; votes:

message: *--Alsocal 09:19, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Only two stubs allowed, both on the main page &mdash; votes:

message: *Viriditas  | Talk 10:22, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Never more than one stub, on the main page &mdash; votes:

message: # Grutness|hello?  09:43, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: As many stubs as necessary, all on the main page &mdash; votes:

message: * Note: If we do the two stubs on the talk page thing, then we should change all the stubs to link to the main page, maybe? -- AllyUnion (talk) 01:19, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Comments:

message: After thinking about it for a couple of days, I've started to wonder if the way that I have been handling Japanese literature stubs (labeling most stubs as a japan-stub, but a very few of the more "important" topics as both a japan-stub and a lit-stub) is the right way to go. Doing it that way is sort of like saying the minor Japanese literature articles are not really literature (even though I've seen the most trivial English-language fancruft marked as lit-stubs. At the same time that doing things that way may be a symptom of an unintentional systemic bias, it may also overemphasize the inherent Englishness of the Wikipedia by making the literature stubs category mostly English-language topics. 
I now think that it may be much better to label all literature stubs as lit-stubs on their main page, and then add a geographic stub, such as the japan-stub, on the talk page when it is appropriate. Doing it this way would allow persons who are interested in literature in general to see the non-English-language literature stubs (and might get them interested in tackling a topic outside of their special interests) but still have the same articles listed in the Japanese stubs category (where, quite honestly, the people most likely to update and fix the stubbiness of an article will probably be looking).
Another example of this unintential bias in the Wikipedia is when I changed a bunch of the stub labels for Japanese TV stations and TV networks from the old  to japan-stubs. If I had labeled them as station-stubs, the articles might be easier to find for those people who have added nice infoboxes to many of the current station-stubs and would help give the Japanese TV station articles the same look-and-feel as the British and American station articles.
So my proposal is that most stubs and substubs should be converted to some general subject stub on their main page, and a geographic stub, when appropriate, should be added to the talk page. Also: for any articles currently labeled with a geographic stub that are not primarily about that geographic region in some way, the geographic stub should be moved to the talk page, and a more general subject stub added to the main page. gK ¿? 05:51, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: How about an easier rule of thumb: Post them into a subject which it fits, if it doesn't fit anything use the region specific. -- AllyUnion (talk) 06:05, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

text: I'd prefer to see more hybrid stubs. Many such exist for geo-stubs, but more could be added for other common stub types.  For instance, if there are indeed  a bunch of Japanese TV station stubs, why not have japan-station-stub, which would be a subcategory of japan-stubs and station-stubs?  That  gives everyone more information, without further bloating the larger topical stub cats.  There is a potential for messiness, but as long as the new stub categories are announced in relevant places, I think they can add a lot.  -- Visviva 23:14, 9 Jan 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There has to be a criteria of how useful a specific stub is going to be. For the Japanese TV stations, the people who are going to search out and expand the stubs are going to be mostly people interested in Japan in general, so creating specific stubs for the TV stations serves little purpose. There is also the fact that there are not that many Japanese TV stations which means that it will be a category that won't have many stubs. On the other hand, a fairly large number of the literature stubs have to do with poetry, and there are a fair number of people who are mostly interested in poetry, rather than literature in general, so it probably makes sense to create a poetry-stub with the poetry-stub category a subcategory of the literature-stub category. gK ¿? 01:47, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

text: Hybrid stubs are certainly more useful, as they are more specific. And the easiest way to find out what hybrid stubs are needed is to run a google search on articles that have both the simple stubs. The only way that method can work, however, is to start by labelling all the target articles with both stub types (note: both must be on the article - it won't work if one of them is on the talk page, which is also a bad idea for other reasons discussed on other WP pages).  Grutness|hello?  09:52, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Systemic bias in stubs? A proposal for handling multiple stubs

message: previous discussion
I don't see a recommendation as to the placement of the stub message on a page in the pages related to policy for this Project (if I missed it, please point me at it and we can trim off this talk-page entry).
My thinking is to either a) add something to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Policy, but as a section called "Recommendations - Not Policy" or b) make a new very small page for "aesthetics of stubbing".  Here's my suggested text, based on the previous discussion with an additional "clause":
:* Place the  at the bottom of the article.  We recommend putting it either directly before or directly after the Category Listing, which makes it easy to find when either removing or replacing it.
:** Putting it after the Category Listing a) puts the stub category at the end of the category listing on the page and b) separates the stub from the article text. However, when there are several categories, this can place a large white space at the foot of the article which some people find very unattractive.
:** Putting it before the Category Listing a) puts the stub category at the front of the category listing on the page and b) keeps the stub close to the article text.  However, close might be "too close" for some who would rather see the stub message (and icon) separated from the text.  To provide some space between the stub and the article, place two blank lines before the stub (i.e. three carriage returns) or use the <BR> (line break) tag.
:* When there is a , we recommend putting the stub between the spoiler message and the article.  This provides some disruption to the flow of the article for those who do not wish to read the spoiler text, making accidental read-through less likely.
In addition to this, maybe we can add to the policy page something like this:
:* Disambiguation pages (having ) should not be stubbed.
:* List pages should not be stubbed.  Instead, use one of the list expansion templates, such as , which should go at the top of the article rather than at the bottom.
:* Category pages should not be stubbed.  Instead, use one of the category expansion templates, such as , which should go at the top of the page rather than at the bottom.
Courtland 23:54, 2005 Mar 27 (UTC)
I sense there's been a fork - most of this stuff has been being discussed over at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Guidelines for the last couple of months. I only found out about this page here in the last 48 hours.  Grutness|hello?  09:57, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stub message position on the page (revisited) 

message: If what we've been working with for a while isn't policy, what is the stub-related policy(policies) and, after months now, is there any notion that there ever will be input into policy from this group?
Courtland 23:04, 2005 Apr 5 (UTC)
: Well... we have actually been more or less following this "policy" as a guideline. -- AllyUnion (talk) 17:07, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move to Policy 

message: This follows from Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#.5B.5BTemplate:Torture-stub.5D.5D and Wikipedia_talk:Stub_sorting_policy#Minimum_number_of_articles_in_a_stub_category and Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Criteria#.26.23123.3B.26.23123.3Btorture-stub.26.23125.3B.26.23125.3B
I don't want to revisit the matter of the threshold for stub count for the creation of a stub type.  I think there's general consensus that a handful of stubs is not enough, that a hundred might be difficult to achieve for narrow topics of active and specific interest, and that WikiProjects are exempt from the threshold.
What I'm curious about is when a stub type is created that does not abide by the guideline and is subsequently found.  Under what circumstances should this found stub type be preserved or deleted?  The stub type in question at WP:TFD is .  As Grutness points out, this is a pre-existing stub type and is therefore not subject to the 100 article threshold for existence.  However, it was created on 1 May by the user LevelCheck and began existence with a very few or no referring articles.  Subsequently, the stub type was brought to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Criteria as a potential type for deletion.  Two things seem to have gone awry at this point.  First, it was put up on WP:TFD without much discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Criteria and second, it started to be used apparently under the (unwritten and doens't need to be written) guideline "if it exists, use it".  Neither one of these things is bad in and of itself, but taken together they clash and the clash has gone to WP:TFD for resolution.
What I'm proposing is that we not automatically say "if it exists, use it".  I do agree with the "if it passes below a stub count we would normally use as a threshold for making a stub type, don't delete it", but that wasn't the case here.  I don't think I'd write this into the policy but would set it aside as "precedent based on policy" which could include a judgement on this particular issue as well as things related to the threshold stub count (100, 60, etc.) ... essentially a "common law" interpretation of the policy, which could sit on a page like Wikipedia:Stub_sorting_policy/Precedents.
Heading off some criticisms, I think this actually works against instruction creep and bureaucracy in that every tiny bit of circumstance isn't encoded in a rule set.  Further, it would provide a body of interpretation to refer to in times of conflict when policy interpretations get heated.
Thanks for giving this a bit of thought.
Courtland 17:07, 2005 May 21 (UTC)
:This particular one came about because of a coincidence - I started going through the big list of found stubs (and proposed stubs that had been made), documenting them over at the styb types list. I found torture stub (which I had noted on the criteria page could take some of the stubs that had been found and temporarily dumped in other categories) - but it had no category attached to it. I created a category but, as sometimes happens, it must have still shown up as a redlink on the template. I then started hunting down items to fill the category, knowing that there would be a considerable number of them, but not exactly how many (my guess is that it will proably end up with 60 or so - and I would regard 60 as a perfectly adequate number of stubs to keep an existing category. After adding the template to a number of stubs, I noticed that the tfd banner was coming up above the torture-stub template when I saved. 
:IMO, there is a grey area here between stubs that have been created and will easily get 100 articles (the recently created US-gov-stub, for instance. Others will clearly never get more than one or two (Eris-stub, anyone?). The problem lies in those ones where the population will probably be between about 25 and 60. In those cases, I think the best question is "how well would these stubs fit in another category?" In the case of torture-stub, many of the items in it wouldn't easily fit into other stub categories, so I don't see any harm in it staying. 
:As far as a list of precedents, though - that's a great idea, and would sit well alongside the archive of discussions which led to successful stub creation as a subpage of /Criteria/Archive. Grutness...wha? 01:13, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: For my part on the nomination at WP:TFD: I'd had posted the info on the torture stub here at the Stub-sorting WikiProject where it recieved very little attention and never had a proper category created for it BEFORE I nominated it at TFD. I was doing a bunch of nominations at TFD, so I figured that I would go ahead and add the torture stub as well. My personal opinion is that although there are articles that are very clearly about a torture-related subject, that the stub itself will likely lend itself to POV problems. To avoid those problems, it should be deleted. BlankVerse ∅  05:15, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

text: I don't really think so - there's certainly been no POV-related problems that I'm aware of at :Category:Torture, and that's been around for quite a while. If you noitice, what you'd previously said was that you were going to list it at tfd if no-one thought it would be useful. I added a comment indicating a use for it. I was quite surprised when I saw it turn up at tfd. Grutness...wha? 07:07, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Back to the 100-stub article threshold