Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Archive 6

message: this pertains to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting#General_rules
Following from the "Big stubs" discussion, and if this is not covered elsewhere, could a line be added to the "General Rules" as follows?
No stub article should sit in only the stub category.  If no other category is listed, add the standard article category that is the parent of the stub category.
This would be helped by providing an index to the standard article categories in which stub categories reside, either as part of the stub types page or as a separate list to be consulted when needed.
Courtland 01:37, 2005 May 30 (UTC)
:I agree. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 06:46, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suggestion for "General Rules" 

message: Didn't have a category attached to it. I've attached :Category:British people stubs now, but this might hurt some of the initial bio-stub sortings, since it was listed on :Category:People stubs - 
SoM 01:22, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: {{tl|UK-bio-stub}}

message: "Wikipedia:Perfect stub article" was heavily edited, merged and now redirects to Wikipedia:Stub. Feel free to improve and discuss the new section Ideal stub article as you see fit. I also took the opportunity to link Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Naming guidelines directly from the main article. ;) Cheers! --Sn0wflake 01:07, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's looking good... but I can't help but wonder whether we need to spell out a bit more clearly to come to WP:WSS beofre making a new stub type. At the moment it's tucked away as the last line of the "New stub categories" section... perhaps we need one extra sentence at the top of that section saying something like "Proposed new stub types are debated at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria.", then carrying on with the rest of the section from there? Grutness...wha? 02:38, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: See if you find the way I've inserted your idea suitable. It generates some level of repetition, but hey... if it's emphasis we are looking for... --Sn0wflake 05:06, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Exthellent. Grutness...wha? 06:35, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Goodbye "Perfect stub article" 

message: I have put a proposal for a bot to sort biography stubs at Wikipedia:Bot requests/Archive 40#Stub_sorting_bot. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 17:12, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stub sorting bot 

message: 1. have killed Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs, objections?
:: The redirect should go the other way around. This will also fix the double-redirects created by this redirection. --Joy [shallot] 23:24, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Reverted, waiting for more input. --Sn0wflake 01:15, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd stick with your first move. It's easy enough to fix the redirects, and keeping it listed under the WikiProject gives a further hint not to create new templates without going through WP:WSS first. The other option would simply be to have Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs show only the one main stub category and (in big letters) a link to the full list. Moving the full list to TM/S will only encourage some clown helpful soul to format it like the other TM lists - which is what we were trying to avoid by making the WP:WSS/ST list in the first place. Grutness...wha? 01:49, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I reverted as a courtesy, but this article is by far the most useless on the project. It needs to be put to rest and that's what I just did. All double-redirects have been fixed. User:Joy, feel free to express your opinion on the issue in case you feel strongly about this. --Sn0wflake 02:10, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  The hunt continues 

message: Anyone know anything about this one? Grutness...wha? 01:53, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The discussion on the talk page was last added to in September 2004 and it seems to me that the concensus was moving towards WP:WSS (did it formally exist then?) being a better idea. TFD, methinks. --TheParanoidOne 09:54, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Template:Notstub]]

message: looks suspiciously non-standard and is also named nonstandardly, without standard redirects.--MarSch 16:48, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That's one from our "found" list on WP:WSS/C that we didn't get around to fixing yet. I copied this post to WP:WSS/C#Film director stubs, and we should continue this discussion there. -- grm_wnr Esc 21:00, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Film director stubs 

message: #There has been a very minor change to the Africa geo-stubs. Up until now, all Indian Ocean island groups normally associated with Africa have been categorised as Southern Africa for the sake of geo-stub articles. The Seychelles have now been moved to East Africa, mainly because, well, they are east, and mostly far further north that any of the countries listed as southern Africa. Since this only currently affect four stubs, it is a very minor piece of fine-tuning. 
#I'm about to break out two or three province-geo-stubs, as listed in the poposed split of Canada-geo-stub at WP:WSS/C. I'd be grateful for any help in populating the categories (a full list from a couple of weeks ago of what article belongs in each of the new categories can be found on one of my subpages at User:Grutness/Canada geo-stub list
Grutness...wha? 07:28, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Slight change in Africa-geo-stubs, and a call for help

message: After getting some Stubsensor cleanup projects under my belt I would like to move it to being a proper Wikiproject. As such I believe it makes the most sense to make it a subproject of this one. Does anyone see a problem with this or have objections? I believe the projects would complement each other well and the Stubsensor project can definitely make use of your stub criteria and policies. I've also noticed that quite a few volunteers for the Stubsensor project are also stub sorters. Triddle 19:27, July 9, 2005 (UTC)
:Sorry for the delay, Triddle. It seems that at times we have slight hierarchical problems within the project... but that's actually a good thing, so who cares. :) Anyway, I believe most of the project's members find your Stubsensor to be a good tool and would not oppose on any level to the parenting of the projects. So take my "yes" as a "general yes". Of course, if a member opposes to this individually in the future, you will have to carry a discussion with him, but for all purposes, go on. This should not be a problem. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 18:07, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I second that. As someone who has worked on the Stubsensor project and with general stub categorising, I think they are quite compatible. mennonot 19:16, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stubsensor becoming a subproject of this one 

message: I uderstood that this template should be applied to approved stub categories, to indacate that future chnages should be made thorugh the /criteria mechanism. Si i added  a mention of it to WP:STUB in the instuctions for creating new stub catefories. User:Sn0wflake reverted this, with the edit summary: User:DESiegel, I believe you are missing the point of that template somewhat. Would you mind taking creating a discussion at WP:WSS first?. I am creating the discussion as requested. If the point of the template is not as I have suggested above, what exactly is the point, and how is it to be used. I thought I was doing obvious maintence work after seeing the brief discuission over creating this template, and looking at the tempalte itself. What did I miss? Look at the edit history on WP:STUB, and particularly this version to see what I said.  Note that I did this change twice, but not as an attempt at a revert war -- I incorrectly thought that my change had been wiped out in the course of repairs to vandalism -- i didn't look at the history closely enough. But that is a minor point, the question is, should this template tag be used on all "approved" stub categories? If not, how and were is it supposed to be used? DES 22:47, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: DES, it seems that the implementation of this information on the guideline page should have been a little different, but your general idea is correct. The wording I propose is something along these lines: "The addition of the  template should be made once your stub category is approved by the WP:WSS, to make clear that it underwent the mandatory revision proccess and was approved by means of consensus." and that this paragraph is not placed on the A,B,C list, since that is directly connected to the green box above it, and it would not make a lot of sense to contain a different letter which does not appear there. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 01:23, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I created the template in an attempt to slow the proliferation of new templates and categories. The template should be used on categories that have been approved by WP:WSS and are currently on the stub type list, but which are likely to attract new splits from people not involved with the project (such as bio-stub, geo-stub, hist-stub and the like). It can theoretically be used on all stub categories that we want to keep, so the edit to WP:Stub was OK, but could do with rewording as Sn0wflake says above. BTW, I'll post a little of this at template talk:WPWSS-cat, as well. Grutness...wha? 01:39, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Note that the instructions tell people they shouldn't even REACH the green box unless they have alredy gone through the week on WP:WSS, and seem -- to me at least -- to imply that no stub category should be created without going through WP:WSS first'. In any case, however this is worded and whereever in the instructions it is placed, I think it should be on the same page that tells people how to create the stub cat, and i think it should at least strongly suggest using  on all new stub categories created via the proper process, as there is no knowing for sure in advance where splits may come. DES 01:48, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, we are implying that all stub categories should undergo revision by the WP:WSS before they are created. Anyway, the one that knows best what should be done with this template is Grutness and I am willing to leave this matter on his hands, now that all opinions have been put forward. --Sn0wflake 02:55, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Use of {{tl|WPSS-cat}}

message: The  template used at the top of the Criteria page states:
:All such articles should be placed in the Category "Stubs to be discussed".
This category is empty. Has it ever been used? What is its purpose? When/why was this line added to the template?
The line itself is also misleading as it taks about articles whereas the template itself is talking about stubs. --TheParanoidOne 17:23, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think it's ever been used. Might be better to change the template to make it similar to , and make it clear that proposals for stubs should be at WP:WSS/C rather than in :Category:Stubs to be discussed Grutness...wha? 09:18, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I've changed it - I've also moved it to  and removed the category from it, since there was never any point for it anyway. The question is, does the deprecated category go to sfd or cfd? Grutness...wha? 11:14, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I suppose it could go either way, but seeing as the other category on it is WSS and it relates to WSS (more or less), probably SFD. --TheParanoidOne 19:52, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

text: I'll try sfd first. Grutness...wha? 01:57, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Stubs to be discussed" on {{tl|newstubs}} 

message: Suggest removal of stubs category from all the UTC pages listed on :Category:Stubs - they are really just linked redirection pages. Scottkeir 04:41, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, I was considering bringing this up myself. Theres no suitable category for them (that I can think of), and they seem to be as complete as possible anyway.M A Mason 20:38, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Be bold if you must, but don't forget to add an HTML comment stating that the stub tag has been removed and the reason for its removal, or it will be tagged back. At the end of this message I'm posting a sample HTML comment in case you guys don't know how to make one. Just check the source to get it.  --Sn0wflake 21:10, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well I went boldly ahead, removed the tags and left a message. Took long enough! Thanks for the info on HTML messages, I knew there was some way of doing it, wasnt quite sure how though. M A Mason 22:43, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Never a problem, helping new project members is always rewarding. As a side-note, remeber that while we are keeping :Category:Stubs at bay, our real focus is on trying to kill the monster we like to call :Category:People stubs. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 23:10, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for your help - especially as I hardly had to lift a finger! Forgive the newbie question, but are HTML comments better than adding a comment to the discussion page for an entry? Now, off to try and help slay that dragon... Scottkeir 16:11, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It depends. It is generally accepted that HTML comments are useful in case you are trying to avoid constant reversion of an article. Try editing Scorpions (band), for example, to see what I mean. However, you should use them sparingly, and always try to solve arguments by means of consensus. A HTML comment is worth nothing if other editors do not agree with its contents. If you need help on anything else, feel free to contact me by means of my Talk page. Cheers. --Sn0wflake 16:25, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Suggestion for UTC pages listed as Stubs at [[:Category:Stubs]]

message: I have a plan (breaking up /Criteria into various smaller pages), stated in detail on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria#Breaking up the page. Please comment there and tell me if it's a good idea or not. -- grm_wnr Esc 18:31, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hey, Grm. I agree with the split and find the idea of the project box quite useful. In other words, as far as I'm concerned you can go ahead. --Sn0wflake 21:34, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Not sure about breaking up the criteria page, but the project box looks very useful. Grutness...wha? 01:18, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  The fate of /Criteria, and a template 

message: I am very unhappy that the automatic code or whatever it is called for stub categories is putting the stub category at the head of the category, eg in :category:France. I think this is an inappropriate promotion of a subcategory which tends to contain articles of low average importance. It is only relevant to the probably tiny fraction of users who actively look for stubs to work on, and is a distraction for the rest of us. I think stub categories should be under S for Stub. 
Is there a simple way to change the code to do this? Can it be done globally for the "code" (ie. the ((Stub Category|article=sports|newstub=sport-stub|category=sports)) thing)? - I've had to use round brackets to get this example out of the sports category.
Perhaps there has already been discussion of this, but if it was only carried out between stubbing enthusiasts, it will have been grossly biased in favour of placing great (and in my view excessive) emphasis on stubs. I really don't think that making stubs the top priority among a group of subcategories is appropriate at all. It demotes good categories, draws attention to poor content when there is plenty of good content to enthuse people about Wikipedia, and I doubt that it even works. Please consider changing this as users are not all stubbing enthusiasts, and I really don't want to have the stub categories shoved under my nose like this. CalJW 00:04, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Very unhappy with over promotion of stub-categories

message: It could be forced to the end of the alphabet by replacing * with "ZZZZZZ", but really it doesn't belong with regular categories at all. Ideally I think it would be in a separate section, maybe there is a symbol that would look right and also be sorted after Z. Kappa 13:25, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Forcing to the bottom

message: Alright, here's another project for any willing individuals: edit the various stub templates and add ... around the template  to remove the annoying external link graphics. I've already done this at Template:Stub. -- BRIAN0918  03:44, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Another project for the crew

message: To match the  template for templates that User:Grutness created, I've created the  template for categories. For example, For :Category:California, if you type , it turns into , where "t" is a link to the category's Talk page, and "l" is for "What links here". BlankVerse ∅ 01:54, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps you could document (here and on its Talk page) when this should be used.  Before it appears on the bottom of every California-entertainment-related-geo-stub. (SEWilco 03:18, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It does look useful, though. I'd suggest mentioning it on Wikipedia talk:Categories for deletion, too (I should do the same on tfd with the one I created!). Grutness...wha? 06:50, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, then I'll mention  here too, which I created recently - it' basically  for Categories. , it turns into . I tried to think of a way to make it clear that it's a category, but I coouldn't come up with anything useful like the template brackets of . -- grm_wnr Esc 08:55, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

text: how about ((double parentheses?)). Grutness...wha? 09:32, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: How about "Cat:"? DES (talk) 12:31, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, that would work - or simply "C:". Grutness...wha? 01:21, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As you can see above, I implemented "Cat:". Change it if you don't like it. DES (talk) 13:30, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

text: Looks good - fine by me as Cat. Grutness...wha? 14:29, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

text: I repeat my request for documentation of when this should be used.  Somehow I think it is not intended to be used at the bottom of articles to indicate membership in a Category.  (SEWilco 15:09, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it should be used when a categoty is being discussed, or mentioned rather than used.  is shorthand for :Category:Foo just as  is shorthand for Template:Foo. On SfD or CfD such mentions would be common. Or someone on a talk page might say "I think this article belongs in  rather than , does anyone disagree? if not I'll change it." That is the reason for this template, i should think. (see Use-mention distinction.)DES (talk) 15:17, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

text: As I implied before, I think this will be of most use in places like the cfd and sfd pages, where categories are frequently referred to rather than being called up to categorise the pages they're mentioned on. BTW, I hope no-one minds, but I added a space after the colon on the template: Cat: Foo just looked a little neater to me that Cat:Foo. If there are any objections, feel free to revert. Grutness...wha? 13:05, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If we're going to say "Cat:", why not go the whole way and say "Category:"? That way it is 100% clear what is meant. (And the amount of space saved with the abbreviation is pretty insignificant.) -Aranel ("Sarah") 18:44, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

text: It does add up, though. I could see this new template being used on , and there any space is at a premium. I think we could get away with using C: or Cat: on there, but Category: would be too long. I don't think many people would be confused by the meaning of "Cat:" (unless the name of the category was something like "Tabby"). Grutness...wha? 01:02, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  new template for categories 

message: After discovering the first topical section-stub (see here), I've been thinking: Is a section "stub" a stub anyway? WP:STUB doesn't mention them. We only care about them because they happen to be called stubs, but otherwise they are something different entirely. I propose removing  and  from WP:WSS/ST, renaming them in line with  (which is redundant right now anyway) and declare that short sections are beyond the scope of the WP:WSS. And we should rename any other section "stub" templates that turn up in the future. We have enough problems already wirth regular stubs.  -- grm_wnr Esc 17:50, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: See my comments under the discovery. IMO this field could be so big that it would need a completely separate wikiproject for sectstubs, organised in parallel with the stub sorting project. I don't no about you, but I haven't the energy or time to go there. Grutness...wha? 01:09, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section "stubs" 

message: I have proposed text, at Wikipedia talk:Stub#Proposed "depth of coverage" standard to try to captue in words the notion thaqt what a stub is cannot be solely defined by a mere mechanical counting of words, sentances, or paragraphs. Please visit and comment. DES (talk) 14:10, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Alternate stub criterion

message: Hi all - I've added a note on standard stub template and category naming guidelines at Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Stub templates and categories. I'd appreciate it if people could have a look and consider improving what I've written if they see fit. Note that I've added it under the "formalised conventions" rather than "conventions under debate" section, mainly because, while it is not totally formalised, it is widely accepted across WP:WSS. Grutness...wha? 01:45, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Naming conventions

message: The maintenance collaboration for Sep 4–Sep 10 is stub sorting.Put on your sorting hat and dig right into :Category:People stubs!
The above added to :Category:People stubs. I have no idea what that means, but if it means we get help with the mountainous people stubs, all the better. --TheParanoidOne 19:40, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As long as we don't end up with 100 newly created stub types because of it... Grutness...wha? 01:41, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

text: It's a box that appears in various places - principally at the top of the Community Portal.  With luck, it means that any bored editors will decide to sort a few of the people stubs.  The collaboration topic changes from week to week: I would expect stub sorting to be there every couple of months. Bluap 09:30, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maintenance collaboration of the week 

message: I was going through the People stubs category, and came across an article about Rixi Markus, a British bridge player. Would it be best to categorize it as a sports stub or something else? I don't know whether bridge really qualifies as a sport. --David Wahler (talk) 19:40, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I would say bridge isn't a sport, as it doesn't require physical activity (which is also what Sport says as far as the definition of a sport). Which unfortunately means there isn't a good place to put the person. Perhaps we need a game-bio-stub to cover that (as there's also a decent number of articles on poker players). For now I'd say  and  would  be best. --Mairi 19:54, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  OK, thanks! --David Wahler (talk) 20:13, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

text: Depends on what you consider to be a sport.  The World Bridge Federation is recognized as a sports federation by the International Olympic Committee and the WBF has been trying to get duplicate bridge into the Olympic Games for quite some time. Caerwine 23:54, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: True; it is hardly clear. But as far as stub sorting, I think (altho I could be completely wrong) that people who would be editing articles on, say, rugby players (or other things in sportbio-stub) wouldn't be that likely to edit articles on bridge players.  Also, at present  isn't a child of . --Mairi 00:21, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is bridge considered a sport? 

message: Over at SFD there is currently a sectstub specific to pokemon articles, and the general vote seems to have been a non-vote - abstaining on the grounds that while not being useful to us as stub sorters it is useful to the Pokemon wikiproject.For this reason, and also given the likelihood that more of these things will start to appear eventually, I'd like to propose the following. Please make any suggestions and amendments you think are needed - this is very much one person's rough draft.
Specialised sectstubs are largely beyond the scope of WP:WSS. They are not sorted by WP:WSS or given specialist sectstub types by WP:WSS. Their similarity to stubs, however, means that WP:WSS is likely to come into contact with them, and as such suggests the following guidelines:
*Specialist sectstubs should only be created for use by WikiProjects. Any specialist sectstub that is unconnected with a WikiProject should be nominated for deletion at SFD.
*WikiProjects may create their own specialist sectstubs without first proposing them at WP:WSS. Deletion of any no longer required should be done through SFD.
*All such sectstubs should remain specific to individual WikiProjects - a specific sectstub should not be shared by several projects.
*Specialist sectstubs should, where possible, conform to a set style as laid out at Wikipedia: Stub and sectstub templates for WikiProjects (I think making this page would be useful anyway, given the number of times WikiProjects create their own stub types without telling us!).
Any thoughts? Suggestions? Grutness...wha? 04:25, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That generally sounds good. Specialized sectstubs ought to be listed on WP:WSS/ST (or elsewhere), tho, so that  people not in the WikiProject the template is for will still know about it. And a seperate page regarding WikiProjects might be useful, but Wikipedia:Stub already mentions this project repeatedly, and that doesn't get the WikiProjects to tell us. --Mairi 05:09, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  I'd be for it under the following conditions: 1) The template is shoved as a subpage of the WikiProject.  2) The template does not use any categories.  Being that it is under the first rule, such a template, despite being a stub, is specifically a template of the WikiProject and has nothing to do with the Stub sorting WikiProject.  Therefore, we should not be maintaining any listing of specialized section stubs, nor are we responsible for deleting them. --AllyUnion (talk) 05:33, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: A lot of wikiprojects (including this one) have a category of pages related to them. I wouldn't mind if thea project's sectstubs led to a subcategory of a wikiproject category, but other than that, yes, there probably shouldn't be categories. Whatlinkshere can always be used to find pages that need fixing. Grutness...wha? 08:14, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  I agree with AllyUnions on the count of categories. There's no need for a category: what links here is fine. However, I don't understand why having it as a subpage of the WikiProject be necessary? --Celestianpower hablamé 09:33, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Templates under a WikiProject's space (subpage) is usually maintained by a WikiProject.  They don't need to be collapsed into a list somewhere, as primarily the only people using the sectstub specifically related to a subject is the WikiProject related to that subject. --AllyUnion (talk) 02:46, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

text: For reference, there's currently 7 pages worth of sectstubs, altho that number could grow alot if individual WikiProjects had templates. --Mairi 06:09, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: A proposal re:Sectstubs

message: I've noticed that  has a Category tag for :Category:Television stubs, as well as the specific :Category:United Kingdom television programme stubs.  It seems that a template should only contain the Category tag for the stub Category associated with it, not the larger category (Television stubs in this case), as otherwise using the more specific tag doesn't help empty out the more general one.  Is that how things work? Silverfish 23:09, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed. I have removed the category from the template. --TheParanoidOne 05:18, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  stub category links re:{{tl|UK-tv-stub}} 

message: :Category:People stubs is down to...hold onto your hats...two pages. It's nearly time to focus depopulating efforts elsewhere, so where should we go? NatusRoma 04:42, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Few ideas: :Category:Musician stubs is at 22 pages. :Category:Musical group stubs, one of its sub cats, is at 18 pages. :Category:Film stubs  is also at 22. :Category:Japan geography stubs is at 20 pages, but that might not be as suited. Those are the only ones at 20 or more. I'd say either Musician or Film would be best. --Mairi 05:09, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I've been thinking about Japan geography stubs, and it could be a difficult one, unless there's someone here who knows a lot about Japanese geography (of course, it could always be split into the four main islands, but...). Another place which could be seful is in going through the bio-stub categories to make sure that the articles are stubbed by both nationality and occupation. It might also be worth thinking about any future splits and sorting of , , and , both of which templates are used on around ten or more pages of stubs.  and  are probably a slightly higher priority. It gives us a few choices for work, though. Grutness...wha? 07:24, 28 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Having had a look in  today 9and whimpered), I think some of the larger Country-stub categories could be looked through, to sort the stubs into geo-stubs, bio-stubs, university-stubs, hist-stubs, struct-stubs etc. If the india one's anything to go by, they're a mess. Grutness...wha? 08:35, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bio-stub 

message: I am coming across stubs assigned to multiple stub categories and, as a result, sporting multiple stub templates. Also, many stub template authors or editors are using icons in their templates, ignoring the official guideline discouraging icons. This is resulting in some very cluttered little stubs. A solution to the multiple stub messages at the bottom of multi-category stubs would be to separage the process of assigning stubs to categories from the stub template, and go back to using a single generic stub template on all stubs. Perhaps this could be automated with a bot. Finell 07:08, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Multiple stubs is the standard practice at WP:WSS, with two being the recommended number, and three being considered okay but not brilliant. As for icons, it used to be discouraged, and still is for heavy use templates that will be used on several hundred stubs. There's no problem with them at all on lighter use templates.As to separating the processes... Oh Ghu... not again! Every couple of months this one comes up, and every couple of months it gets defeatesd as - to put it bluntly - ridiculous and defeating of the whole exercise of sorting stubs. But not nearly as much so as going back to a generic template that will destroy the last year's worth of work on this project and make it impossible for any editors to find stubs to work on - not to mention crippling the servers by havin one template on a mind-boggling number of articles (at a conservative estimate, I'd say 60,000). Grutness...wha? 08:10, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I actually think the idea has its merits, because really, what could be better than undoing months upon months of tedious work in order to make the bottom of articles look slightly more pleasing? It's a great idea, you have to admit. --Sn0wflake 18:18, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Although my solution may be impractical, I definitely was not suggesting undoing the very valuable work of sorting and categorizing the stubs, which enables author-editors to find stubs to expand within their areas of interest and expertise. I thought I made that clear. The stubs would still display their category assignments (however many may be appropriate) in the categories box, but only a single stub message. I have no technical understanding of the burden on Wikipedia's servers caused by large numbers of articles incorporating the same template, so I yield to those who do. Finell 01:08, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: From what I understand, your idea basically involves the modification of current stub templates so that they would contain no visual data, only metadata, thus allowing the articles to be included on categories, but not adding any text/image to the article. The problem I see with that idea is that few people find stub templates obstrusive, as they are already placed outside of the main text body anyway. Unless you have a good argument for suggesting a change of such scope, I don't think there is going to be much support for your idea. --Sn0wflake 01:28, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: No, that is not what I said. I would include, ONCE at the bottom of the stub, the former generic stub template with the VISIBLE italicized message that invites readers to "help Wikipedia" by expanding it. That is what I meant by "only a single stub message" in my last comment above. I would even favor making that message somewhat more prominent, perhaps by formatting it like the current disamgiuation template (set off by horizontal lines). All I object to are multiple nearly identical categorized stub messages, most of them with icons; I would leave the stub categories, NOT the message, in the medadata. But I don't mean to belabor this, and obviously yield to concensus. That is why I raised it on a Talk page; I haven't edited any stubs to conform to my sole views. I'm not that bold. Finell 06:57, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, if that's what you propose I will have to tell you that your idea is not very interesting for the project, and why not say, incredibly complicated. Unless you are willing to write a bot of some sort, that is. Doing the conversion you propose manually is incredibly counterproductive. And really, does the current syste bother you that much? They are just small messages completely outside of the article's space. --Sn0wflake 01:55, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

text: What's more, the stub messages do act as an incentive to editors. I have been spurred on to edit articles simply by the fact that the message at the bottom has asked me to. Grutness...wha? 05:55, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with you. Please see my reply to Sn0wflake immediately above. Finell 06:57, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

text: Fair enough - I realsied after I'd written that that that point wouldn't make much difference. But the multiple stub message isn't really much of an annoyance - certainly not enough of an annoyance to go about rewriting the 400 or so different stub templates. The annoying thing is that there are stubs at all. It's the length of the article that makes these things ugly, rather than the templates on the bottom - as was pointed out the last time something like this was suggested about five months ago. Grutness...wha? 07:25, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Perhaps multiple stub templates will irritate someone into expanding a stub, and I sarcastically suggest a multi-stub template saying "This article is a stub in multiple categories and you are invited to supply details in all the categories so as to get rid of all these messages."  (SEWilco 02:57, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

text: With respect, and with no intention of insulting you or your suggestion, perhaps it would be worth watching how a particular project works for a while in future before making suggestions about how it can be changed. With so many people working on wikipedia, chances are that many alternative methods of doing things have been tried and rejected in the past - something that may not be immediately clear to someone who has been on Wikipedia about three weeks. Suggestions are welcome, but suggestions which have been considered and soundly rejected in the past are likely to receive less than welcoming responses. Re-reading my original response, I could have been less confrontational, so apologies if any offence was taken! Grutness...wha? 05:11, 3 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You owe me no apology, but I agree with the rest of your message. I apologize for not considering the history before commenting. Finell 08:08, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stubs in multiple categories: Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again? 

message: User:Radiant! unprotected Template:Stub several months ago claiming its use was deprecated by this WikiProject. That allowed a vandal to place over a megabyte of data in that template, rendering pages with this template unloadable (the requests timed out), and the problem could only be identified with the help of a developer. Regardless of the opinion held by members of this WikiProject, that template is still used by some users, including myself. If members of this WikiProject feel compelled to run around behind us, categorising our stub tags for us, go right ahead. But I don't have any inclination to do that, and I am not a member of this WikiProject so please do not render the one stub tag I do use susceptible to vandalism by unprotecting it. - Mark 04:04, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The unprotection was not because it was deprecated (it isn't deprecated, and never has been) - just that it was now used by few enough articles that changes to it weren't going to put a lot of starin on the servers. The original reason for protection was that changes to any template used on 14,000 articles (which it was) would create havoc with the Wiki. Since the number of "pure" stubs was down to a couple of hundred, this was no longer a danger. However, if people are vandalising the stub template, then perhaps the idea of protecting it needs to be revisited. Grutness...wha? 07:13, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, as a result of someone's edit, Template:Stub recently displayed in visable text a statement that the use of that template is deprecated due to Stub sorting, which therefore appeared on all stubs that used the template.  I remarked negatively about making the deprecation message visible at Template_talk:Stub#Undeprecate_the_generic_stub_template and, independently,  bureaucrat Rdsmith4 removed the the deprecation message from Template:Stub. In any event, it appears that Template:Stub is now protected. Finell 08:05, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Template:Stub]] 

message: Hey everyone, this is just a reminder that WikiSort, a subproject of the Version 1.0 Editorial Team, has begun!  This project has the potential to eliminate stubs, so come check it out! the1physicist 05:22, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Project WikiSort 

message: There is some discussion regarding the subst'ing of templates, and a bot is under development that will automate the task. I would like to ask your opinion on subst'ing stub templates. Please take a look at Wikipedia:Subst. Radiant_>|< 15:51, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I would strongly oppose using subst with stub templates. This would make future stub-sorting and the removal of stub-tags much harder, it would also make cahning the wordign of a stub tag ineffective on already stubed articles. Please don't do this. DES (talk) 17:55, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: User:Radiant! has, unfortunately, brought this to your attention without placing it in context.  The page referred to lists a set of templates that are purported to be OK and desireable to always insert via the "subst" method.  This list does not include stub templates.  Nonetheless, it might be useful to put in 2-cents to indicate views with regard to stub templates as a class. Regards, Courtland 18:03, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

text: And come to that, always/auto-substing has been suggested for stub types (on the talk page), it's just not on the "current list" on the project/proposed policy page.  Alai 19:58, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Fair enough .. maybe I was caught in an "anti-panic" moment there and came down too hard.  As for changes in the appearance of a template depending on whether or not it is subject to subst, it should not change from the perspective of someone viewing the page.  I tested on the Sandbox and found that both  and  gave the same appearance to viewers of the page, but in the source of the page, they appeared as  and {{disambig}}, respectively. Is this what you refer to as making things look unsightly, from the source perspective? Courtland 00:25, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Consider what  would look like with those to subst'ed. Mind you,  itself would be unusable if it had to be subst'ed! Grutness...wha? 00:41, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Substology 

message: Back around when images were first being added to all the stub templates, there was suddenly an announcement of an 'emergency' hardware expenditure necessitated by the image server becoming a bottleneck due to the increased number of image requests. I've noticed the image server seems to be becoming a bottleneck once again (the text loads fairly quickly, but the images often take an extra 30 seconds or so). Since the images on stub templates (and the like) are certainly non-critical, and at best just 'nice to have', I suggest we remove all images from stub templates (and similar 'nice to have' uses) so we can spend Wikipedia financial/server/bandwidth resources for more urgent uses. Niteowlneils 22:25, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: For example, it took so long to wait for :Image:Evolution-tasks2.png (linked near the top) to load after the rest of the page was done, my browser (Firefox) finally gave up. Niteowlneils 22:33, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

text: I see that User:RedWolf commented out the image in  on 16 November to "reduce image server load". Should we consider doing this to all stub templates with images? --Bruce1ee 06:32, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Images on stub templates starting to slow Wikipedia (again) 

message: Hi, I'm actually here to write complete articles, not to sort stubs.  Thanks, Silly rabbit 02:34, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That's great. We certainly need more ppl like you. We can even work together. We sort stubs so you can easily find them and make them into full articles. -- Zondor 02:44, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There are 100 stub sorters, and many thousands of wiki editors. We do the job so you don't have to. Grutness...wha? 03:35, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's easier to sort stubs than to write complete articles.  Although we appreciate your work, I was directed here by a please help link, and I have no wish to help in your efforts.  No offense.  Silly rabbit 04:50, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

text: I suppose that makes us Scrubbing Bubbles ;) Courtland 03:53, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

text: No, that's unnecessary.  I was just venting because I made a few stubs while writing a few articles, and the stub-sorters were on my tail like molasses.  Kinda made me angry that they vandalized the talk page with a big box thingy, but I am willing to forgive given the vigilant job you do here (now that I have educated myself a bit).  Keep up the good work, and I'll try to keep my stubs nice and sorted from now on.  Thanks,  Silly rabbit 05:33, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I posted that on the talk, am new to stub sorting, and got a little confused, certainly not trying to annoy!  Hopefully all this stub sorting will continue to lead to more knowledgeable contributors adding to the articles (I hope it adds to *my* articles!) Xaosflux 05:37, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: No problemo.  Thanks, Silly rabbit 05:50, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Wait a minute -- I think you need to back off from that accusation of vandalism, User:Silly rabbit. Courtland 06:11, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Right, I meant to say "posted an utterly irrelevant and unsightly piece of garbage in the talk page."  But I couldn't quite find the words at the time.  Perhaps, "accidental mishap" is a better description under the circumstances. :P  Silly rabbit 06:44, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

text: The box was the one mentioned earlier on this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Stub_sorting#Notice_on_talk_pages, to wit:
	
This stub-notice is maintained by WikiProject Stub sorting, an attempt to bring some sort of order to Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can choose to improve/expand the articles containing this stub notice, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
Thinking that this was part of the project I posted it on one of my earlier stub-sorts, hoping that it would NOT OFFEND the original contributor when sorting their article to a stub topic, and thinking that it's use would let them know that we were working on making their article more visible for potential on-topic editors.  After sorting I proablly never would have looked at the article again (out of my scope of editorial interest).  If we want to use this template perhaps the wording could be updated to make it clear what the intention of this project is.  Personally I just don't use it anymore.  
I don't think that it's insertion was vandalism, nor do i think that Silly rabbit's clearing of it from the talk page of that article was inapproriate.  Hopefully this will be the end of this confusion. Xaosflux 06:20, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Note what the box says - "This stub notice is maintained..." It's used on the talk pages of stub templates, particularly those which have been subject to edit wars or other unnecessary amendments. Not on article talk pages. Perhaps that needs to be more clearly explained at WP:STUB.... Grutness...wha? 07:36, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Let me set one thing straight, the original author is NOT OFFENDED AT ALL.  I hope some good comes out of this conversation, but I really wish you no ill will at all User:Xaosflux.  I've already put the whole thing behind me, but I really don't want to see you treated unfairly because of my remarks.  I apologize most sincerely if I've caused problems for you.  Silly rabbit 08:29, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Don't worry - I think I'm probably speaking for all WP:WSS people when I say that we're not angry with Xaosflux - in fact, we're very happy that he's decided to join the project (welcome aboard!). And sorry if I sound grumpy about things at times here (it's very difficult to express feelings properly in this form of communication). Xaosflux will have learnt that the templates are not used, we've learnt to make sure that the information about that template is a bit clearer... hopefully everyone's come out of this fine and some good's been done! Grutness...wha? 09:24, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you think that a slight modification to the box text should be made to clarify the intent that this notice is related to templates and not to articles?  P.S. if yes, I have some thoughts on that but would want to start a new discussion thread to address it. Courtland 13:35, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Possibly... I've made a few changes to the information on templates we have at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting and put something on the template's discussion page, which may be enough, though. Grutness...wha? 01:11, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  No interest in stub sorting 

message: :I've been working on stub sorting, but am a little confused, I've been mostly sorting unmarked stubs and the {stub} stubs; but have only been sorting in to the catagories on : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Stub_types; but also see this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Stub_categories
Which should be used for these purposes? Xaosflux 05:28, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The oofficial list is the one at WP:WSS/ST, so use that. Any stubs that are in the category but not there should be reported at WP:WSS/D so that we can see whether or not they'd be useful before either making them official or sending them for deletion. BTW, welcome to the project! Grutness...wha? 07:32, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stub Sorting clarification 

message: I've been thinking a bit about how to graduate more articles from being stubs other than writing more (lazy, aren't I ;) ).  Consider Habakkuk — this article had a stub template added in March 2005 and has gone through a number of edits since then but has not expanded or substantially changed in content.  One might rightly argue that its length alone graduates it from stub-status and it shouldn't have been stubbed in the first place, but I want to explore a different path than that one.  In this case, I've added some text to the talk page which is intended to pass the baton regarding stub-status back to editors knowledgable about the domain in which the article sits.  The text added ..
     ==Stub status==
     to content knowledgable editors
     The stub template was added to this article in March 2005 and the text has not expanded since that time.  Should we assume that 
     the article is reasonably comprehensive for top level concepts related to the topic and that it is merely lacking detail?  If 
     yes, then the article could be removed from the stub category, having graduated from it.  Thanks for the input.
I am thinking that some modification of this could be used as boilerplate to attack the mounting stub counts from a different quarter, though its usage should be judicious and not blanket across all stub'd articles lest it reflect bot activity rather than specific editorial consideration.
Thanks for your thoughts. Courtland 13:54, 13 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Boilerplate for editorial input on stub designation 

message: I've posted a note on the talk page for WikiProject Albums that proposes a set of guidelines to assist in determining when an article in the "musical album" topic area should be considered a stub or not.  The set of guidelines is presented as a checklist that draws directly from the information about suggested content for album articles present on the WikiProject's main page. I believe, as stated at the bottom of the referenced addition, that one answer to reducing the number of stubs overall is to couple the activities of topical WikiProjects with those of the stub sorting community, one way being the insertion of guideline sets such as that proposed.  If one were to take a longer term view this could be seen as one step down the road toward bot-assisted stub tagging/de-tagging based on content via reading of a set of content tags embedded in each article ... but that's only one possible future.  Regards, Courtland 14:14, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: While I think it's a good idea in theory, I'm not really sure it's possible in practice, for pretty much the reasons you've given yourself. Each wikiproject is going to have its own ideas for what is and what isn't a stub - extrapolating from that, we'd need a set of guidelines for articles which would vary widely from topic to topic, or even for different subjects within topics. I'm not sure that's really practical (I'd like to be proved wrong, mind you). Grutness...wha? 01:39, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

text: That seems quite reasonable. Thanks. Courtland 00:38, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tactics in the "war on stubs" - graduation from stub status 

message: Just thought y'all would like to know that I've just been looking at the fascinating, if surprising List of Wikipedia pages that have been edited the most. Of the four most edited wikiproject pages, three of them are WP:WSS pages (with the Stub types list, of all things, in first place). Only the talk page of WP Mathematics (3rd) knocks us out of a clean sweep of the top three. And since WP:SFD, a closely related page to ours, is also in the same ball-park, editwise, I suspect that makes this the busiest wikiproject! :) Grutness...wha? 00:14, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Somethings to keep in mind: a) the listing does not include talk pages, b) some WikiProjects opt to have their core definition pages to be quite stable while most of the editing occurs on non-WikiProject pages (for example: WikiProject:Disambiguation). I'm not trying to be a wet blanket, just injecting some additional context to help in interpreting the numbers. Courtland 04:45, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There are quite a large number of talk pages listed (including wikipedia talk, user talk, and article talk pages). As I said above, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics was third most edited project page. Grutness...wha? 05:26, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If edits of WP:WSS/P and WP:WSS/C (its predecessor) were combined, their total number would be around that of Michael Jackson. :) Conscious 07:24, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Busiest WikiProject?

message: In templates on my watchlist I see more and more <noinclude> being used, for instance to display graphics on the template page, or for linking to equivalent templates on sister wikis. Sometimes the <noinclude> and its contents get deleted by other editors, sometimes not. Does WSS have any recommendations for or against the use of <noinclude> in stub templates? Thanks. --Eddi (Talk) 11:56, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems to be generally considered a good idea across the project to put in stuff about when to use the template and what categories it populates. Susvolans ⇔ 12:21, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

text: In general it hasn't come up; some templates have noincluded interwiki links, which I think makes sense. As far as general as explanatory text, that's not too practical since most stub templates are created using , and noinclude sections don't show up with subst. I'm also not sure what else would make sense to have in includeonly tags. The only thing that's really been discussed is to not put the associated category in <includeonly> tags, but to use noincludes to sort the template to the beginning of the category (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals#Include-only for stub categories on stub templates). --Mairi 19:42, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for your comments. There was an edit summary for a template less than a month ago stating that "... is considered harmful" but now I cant remember if "..." was noinclude or includeonly, or which template it was for. I didn't think much about it at the time, until I realised that the usage was increasing. Anyway, I'll just leave it for now. --Eddi (Talk) 00:12, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

text: One important caveat with this - please don't noinclude or includeonly the category name such that it doesn't show up when the template is viewed. It's important for stub sorters to be able to check that a template correctly links to an appropriate category at a glance! Grutness...wha? 06:00, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hrm, that's exactly what's being proposed over there.  Or more precisely, to replace the included categorisation with a link to the category.  Alai 06:50, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  The use of &lt;noinclude&gt; in stub templates 

message: I'm not formally a participant of this project, but I noticed that there is a notice in :Category:Medicine stubs that the category is becoming too large. If someone could create :Category:Medical organization stubs (or something similar) and its associated template, I could move a bunch of professional organizations and hospitals into it. Thanks! Edwardian 07:04, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Ditto for :Category:Diseases stubs. Edwardian 07:09, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'll move this suggestion to the Proposals page - it's not a bad idea. Those are two subcategories we don't have which might be very helpful (as might hospital-stub) Grutness...wha? 07:43, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Medicine stubs

message: Also on Wikipedia_talk:stub, I've taken another tilt at the old windmill of toning down the wording on not using more than two stub tags, which IMO ignores much stub-sorting practice, and indeed much of the whole logic of the category system.  Lacking an actual X-Y-Z-stub for a given entity that's equally an X, Y, and Z, we'd end up having to choose an essentially arbitary subset.  Anyone else care to weigh in, either way...?  Alai 06:54, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Multi-stubbing 

message: Stub-sorting was in part aimed at avoiding the problem of having one huge stub category containing stubs on a whole mish-mash of subjects.  However, this is still happening because stub sorters are mis-using .  It seems that  is being used as a synonym for "miscellaneous", and growing the very sort of mish-mash stub category that stub-sorting was supposed to prevent.
I am going to go through :Category:Vocabulary and usage stubs and remove all stubs that have nothing to do with either vocabulary or usage (such as platter, premonition, and support engineering).  Uncle G 17:05, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Systematic mis-use of vocab-stub 

message: According to , there are 1446 stub categories. After adding all numbers listed at today's version of WP:WSS/ST (they are given for 1252 categories, others are new or not listed), I obtained an estimated value of 332000±1700 stubs (each stub counted as many times as many tags it contains).
If one assumes there are 1.5 tags on an average stub, this would mean that there are 220000 stubs in Wikipedia (25% of total number of articles). Conscious 13:09, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds logical. --Celestianpower háblame 18:11, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: And if we assume that approximately 50% of stubs still need sorting properly, and that there are indeed 117 regular stub sorters, then we each have about 940 stubs to sort. Dodgy maths I know, but it does make it seem a bit less daunting when you only have a thousand stubs each! Mushintalk 12:26, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There are times when it feels like I've seen all 220 000... of course, the poroblem is that Wikipedia is growing exponentially, and so is the number of stubs. But 940's a nice total to think about. After all,  once had 15000 stubs in it. It's currently got 29. Grutness...wha? 01:10, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

text: I recently computed some statistics along the same vein and made charts. See User:Dantheox/Stub percentages for a chart of both the number of articles and stubs, and the number of stubs as a percentage of total articles. The rapid growth in the total stub count over the past two years has been pretty spectacular. --Dantheox 06:57, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

text: Maybe not for the reasons you think, though. The number of articles marked stub has been rising since stub sorting has got more systematic - in the early days (as recently asa  year or so ago) most short articles weren't marked as stubs. I'm not saying that there aren't a bigger proportion of stubs now, just that the figures may be a bit misleading. Another factor which may mean there are more stubs now is that - as the number of articles increases, increasingly obscure subjects are being found for articles. The early Wikipedian articles were on subjects that were relatively easy to expand. Many more recent articles may well be relating to subjects which can't be expanded nearly so readily. Grutness...wha? 23:48, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes, I'm entirely willing to accept this as the reason that the stub percentage has been increasing -- it would be hard to believe that there really were no stubs before 2004! But the charts are meaningful then as a gauge of the progress of this project. I was also surprised to find out that nearly 40% of articles are stubs (possibly more than that now). Now that we've reached a million articles, maybe flesching out the ~400,000 of those stubs should become a higher priority. --Dantheox 02:51, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Fleshing out the articles has always been the no. 1 top priority. But in order for editors to be able to find articles that relate to their field of expertise, someone has to sort them. So we sort stubs - I'm sure the majority of stub sorters also spend time expanding articles. The list of "saves from AFD" on my user page lists a few of those that I've expanded considerably, and I'm sure I'm not the only stub-sorter expanding articles. Grutness...wha? 06:11, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Total number of stubs (some statistics) 

message: Note to anyone on the project who hasn't seen these yet:
:Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion and :Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals are both up for Miscellany for deletion.  You may want to stop in there and make a comment. xaosflux Talk/CVU 04:23, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  MFD's 

message: I've created a userbox for particpants in this wikiproject to add it to their userpage. Use : 
:Thanks, just added it!xaosflux Talk/CVU 00:41, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This userbox has apparently been deleted, are there any plans to remake a userbox for Wikiproject stub sorting? Many of the other projects still have userboxes. Mushintalk 15:29, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

text: Can somebody who knows about this kind of thing make it up then, please? Mushintalk 17:33, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Ah ok I see what you mean. I'll use  then. Mushintalk 17:35, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, a new usebx would better, as  links the improper category Circeus 17:36, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hold on, would it not be a good idea to move :Category:WikiProject Stub sorting participants to :Category:Participants in WikiProject WikiProject Stub sorting then? Mushintalk 17:42, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

text: Seeing the administrator box moved to , I've created one for us at .  Slambo (Speak) 17:41, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, I'll use that for now then. If they mess stuff around again, we may need to move the cat as I said above? Mushintalk 17:44, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If you make the template add users to :Category:WikiProject Stub sorting participants then we can add it to the category page accordingly. Mushintalk 17:47, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Please note, this template has been restored, but there is discussion on its page. xaosflux Talk/CVU 05:02, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Userbox 

message: I just found this page today.  In the short term, we have four editors who have stated that they will not use any of the stub subtypes.  The arguments that I can see center around the WP:SFD process and its interactions with AFD, TFD and CFD.  There is also a mention of a "lack of a clearly defined stub naming policy" that I find hard to reconcile (WP:STUB and WP:WSS/P cover this).  The question is, what do we need to do before we're asked to present the 27 8x10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one? Slambo (Speak) 16:24, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, so I just read the MFD debate; from what I can tell, it looks like the whole debate centers around the deletion of a stub template redirect.  Specifically, the deletion of  which was a redirect to  was carried out on RFD and not SFD (I'm probably missing something here), so the editor deemed SFD either as redundant or overreaching when compared with the RFD/TFD/CFD processes.  To me, it looks like the real problem is that someone took a stub template redirect deletion to the wrong place, so the solution would be to modify the RFD/TFD/CFD procedures to specify that anything related to stub templates should be discussed only on SFD.  Right?  Slambo (Speak) 16:49, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The redirect situation is complicated and will get serious resistance if you unilaterally try to make stub redirects a SFD issue at this point. Discussion is at RFD talk as far as I know, chip in if you're interested. As for User:SPUI/SFD: Do nothing. Their refusal to use sorted stub templates is a prerogative of theirs, and does not add significant overhead. The rallying page is an annoyance, but not worth getting in conflicts over. While I don't want to accuse these editors of trolling (They may have some legitimate concerns), I nonetheless suggest not to feed them. What should be done, deleting the page? Nothing but more trouble can come of this. (Although I find it amusing that people accuse WSS of creating too much bureaucracy and want a tighter policy at the same time). -- grm_wnr Esc 17:08, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As long as there are no relevant users involved, I do not think there is much to be concerned over. If an editor decides to take this path instead of discussing the issue at hand, than it's the editor' own problem, as long as he or she does not interfere with our work. --Sn0wflake 17:39, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

text: Cool, thanks.  I had guessed that things were already moving in that direction, and now that I read RFD talk, I find that I agree with the solutions that were presented there and that are already in the works.  I don't patrol , so I wasn't entirely aware of the impact to the main category (but I do wander through  as that's my own area of expertise).  I've seen several stubs tagged with  instead of , so I'll sit back and watch to see the outcome.  Slambo (Speak) 18:40, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stub non-sorters 

message: User:Jengod has decided to change around 150 stubs adding "and citing the source of your information." after "This article [...] is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it". Apparently this has been done without consulting other users first. Since many articles are double- (or even triple-)stubbed, this line will now be all over the place. I believe that it should be removed immediately, people can be nagged about citing sources elsewhere. A discussion on this issue is taking place at Wikipedia_talk:Stub#Addition_of_.22cite_your_sources.22, and I'd like to hear the opinion of other users. Please note that some of these edits have been made to stubs which can only be accessed by administrators, so it'll take an administrator to undo them (this applies to e.g.  and ). Regards. --Valentinian 15:11, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This issue has been resolved. --Valentinian 18:59, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  A user has added "and citing the source of your information." to a ton of stubs 

message: Would there be any objections to me routinely running Mairibot on the redirects listed at WP:WSS/R to orphan them? Ones that could be used for a future split (which ought to be marked with ) would be left alone. Doing so has been mentioned a few times, and would help alleviate the possible server-load problems. --Mairi 04:33, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Seems like a reasonable plan. Assuming there are no major objections, I could help you out with TPO-bot, once it gets the bot flag. --TheParanoidOne 06:05, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Talking of redirects... have you had a look at WP:SFD lately? Or, for that matter, at [SPUI's fun on Dec. 24th? Grutness...wha? 07:59, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Great. The fun just get ... funner. :sigh:. --TheParanoidOne 22:28, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Orphaning stub redirects 

message: Extreme Unction has initiated an interesting discussion on the actual impact of template redirects. --TheParanoidOne 00:57, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The impact of template redirects 

message: there are a lot of old deletion logs in , and it look like they need an admin to clean them up and remove them from there. anyone able to help? BL kiss the lizard 06:22, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm on it, but those pages are ... big! --TheParanoidOne 13:30, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

text: Done. --TheParanoidOne 14:45, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Deletion logs

message: We have a rather large backlog. Each of us has some field of interests, and it seems that people work alone sorting different categories, and eventually get bored (at least if there's a lot to do). Let's concentrate our efforts! For example, we can take . It's 24 pages long, sorted through A and has a lot of relatively new subcategories. We can put large neon signs at WP:WSS and WP:WSS/T asking for help and expect that category to fall in a week or two. Then we can mark something else as our major work.
What about this plan? Does anyone have alternative ideas? At the moment it seems we're creating more work for ourselves at WP:WSS/P than we can manage. Conscious 14:09, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Good plan. There's a "Things to do" section of the WSS page. Perhaps that needs to be emphasised some more. Or may hilight one (eg. Album stubs) as a "This is what we are all focusing on now. Come and help." type thing? --TheParanoidOne 23:04, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: WSS backlog

message: This suggestion is not that serious, and comes out of curiosity. I wonder how many stub-sorters are active, and how many are former members. To find this out, project participants can be asked just to sign their name on some page. All that's needed is a note at WP:WSS and probably at WP:WSS/T and WP:WSS/P. Conscious 14:09, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: WSS census

message: I don't know if this overlaps with existing tools, or not, but if people have some spare time, I'd like some help with :Category:Album stubs.  I have a tool that identifies things that really obviously should be sorted, there are currently ~1200 articles identified (that's 6 of the 24 pages in album stubs):
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/reports/output/?C=S;O=D
While it's not a bot, it does make the work much quicker.  Those reports currently list articles that are 1) in :Category:Album stubs, and 2) which are in a category whose name contains eg. "rock", OR 2b) the album-stub links to an article whose name contains eg. "rock".  So these are the blindingly obvious ones, but maybe it will help some.
If there are other ideas for reports, or if the current reports need to be run again to purge the items that have already been sorted, ping my talk page.  (it would be really nice to grep for "progressive" in the article's text, but at the moment, article text isn't available on the toolserver due to some technical issues.  Link data is available though)  --Interiot 19:32, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've whipped up a little monobook.js extension that helps tremendously when sorting stubs - if anyone wants to try it, put the contents of this revision of my user monobook.js into your user monobook. Tested with Firefox 1.5, but should work with any recent browser. Obviously, the Monobook skin is needed. Usual disclaimers apply, use at your own risk, etc. It's also pretty hard-coded, so remove it again once you don't need it anymore. -- grm_wnr Esc 23:30, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  That's pretty cool.  --Interiot 00:06, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

text: Well, the list currently is only based off of words in the links (it ignores other words in the article), which tends to make the good/bad ratio better (something like 90% for the metal category that I'm going through), but yeah, that's still not 100%.  --Interiot 00:06, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tools 

message: I have generated a list of untagged stubs, they are all very short articles with no stub tag and there are quite a few of them, they all need to be sorted! Martin 14:30, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks! But both of those lists need to be treated with a little caution. I note that the first list contains quite a few disambiguation pages, which - by definition - aren't stubs. As to the second section, you can get stub articles that have one line of description followed by a very long list of examples. Unless the first part of each of those articles is extended, they are still very much stubs - but might be of quite some size. An example of that from your list is Canadian Football Hall of Fame - a short paragraph with virtually nothing on the Hall of Fame itself, followed simply by a list of everyone inducted. And have a look at the arrondissement articles listed there - they're almost all like that. There is no one-to-one correlation between article length and whether it's a stub. Grutness...wha? 12:45, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Most of the problems with the untagged stub list are due to the fact that the database dump is 1 month old, and since then many of them have been tagged (either with disambig or stub), I suspect the dump will be updated again soon, then it will be a great way to identify untagged stubs and disambigs. I appreciate there isnt a 1 to 1 correlation with long articles and non-stubs, but the correlation is good enough to identify quite a lot. Martin 13:01, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I'm not saying that this list-creation is a bad thing - far from it, it will be very useful. I'm just suggesting a bit of wariness about assuming that what's there needs/doesn't need a tag. Are disambiguation pages automatically removed from the short article list, BTW? If so, then the ones I saw there would have been due to being re-tagged since the database dump was run (similarly, I noticed a few short articles which did have stub tags). It looks like someone has gone through and written a LOT of Greek mythology stubs, BTW! Grutness...wha? 13:08, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes it does ignore disambigs, in fact it ignores a page with any template, after the next datadump it will hopefully be much more useful. I added a brief note on the page to highlight the issues you raised, thanks Martin 13:57, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  New objective: untagged stubs 

message: The Template:India-bio-stub puts all articles with that stub in Category:Indian people stubs, but also in Category:Indian people. Is there a way for the stub the only put articles in the stub category? It seems so pointless to have a musician in a indian musicians category and also in the indian people category, plus it makes the category so large. Garion96 (talk) 21:46, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It shouldn't have been doing that. I have removed the "Indian people" category from the template. --TheParanoidOne 22:05, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I tried that too, but still the articles were and are in the category. Does it take time for those changes to go into effect? Garion96 (talk) 22:11, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

text:  Still does not work. The articles are still in the category indian people. However, when you look at a specific article, like Amjad Ali Khan it doesn't say the article is in the category indian people. Weird...Garion96 (talk) 12:15, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That's the way templates work. Those articles will stay in the indian people category until they are next edited, and then they'll be removed from it. When a template is changed, all articles using that template need to be null-edited for any associated category changes to take effect. With so many articles in , it would be a long job to do that, though, unless we use a bot to null-edit them all. Grutness...wha? 12:40, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I guess I should have done that when I made the change to the template. I'll get my bot on it. --TheParanoidOne 13:33, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  So that's how it works. Another thing learned. :) Tnx for all the help. Garion96 (talk) 13:36, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: India bio stub 

message: There's a discussion on WP:STUB about the idea of having a parameter to hide a stub templates, but still have the page added to the category; with the idea that it could be useful for pages that have multiple stub tags. Any additional input there would be great. Mairi 08:20, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Parameter to hide stub templates 

message: Developer Jamesday has requested that images only be used for content, not decoration. The reason for this is that images cause a major server load problem; the actual size of the image is not really relevant. Hence, please remove images from stub templates, and use formatted or colored text instead. Radiant_>|< 11:17, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: sad. I thought that had been fixed when we went to MW1.5. Grutness...wha? 11:37, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I question the benefits of this. The same logic could be applied to images in those 'this page is part of WikiProject whatever' banners (and 'Featured Article' banners and so forth) that are added to talk pages, , the keyhole image on all portal links, the new help page format with little icons, et cetera. We use alot of images. I think the problem is when they are all concentrated together on a page you get a big server spike. Stub templates are only ever going to add one additional image to the page each... if it is in several stub-categories maybe two or three total. I think we should try to set a limit on 'how many images per page' rather than removing images in general. Note - I agree with you about the userboxes even though that is likely to be much more contentious... they are also clearly much more of a problem with some pages having hundreds of userbox based images. --CBD ☎ ✉ 13:25, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

text: *I have already made the request of userboxes, and removed the image from a few maintenance templates. I realize that each individual stub template is only a drop in the bucket, but there are a lot of drops - and there isn't really a practical reason why stub templates should have an image, other than that they look cute. You are of course welcome to contact the devs if you wish to make a feature request to limit the amount of images loaded for any page, but that seems a bit impractical to me. Radiant_>|< 15:14, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That's not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting that we ignore the drops and concentrate on the gallons. If a particular template has an image in it, but isn't going to be viewed frequently / combined with other image bearing templates frequently then why make a big deal out of it? Before going after every little template which has an image on it and getting into a huge brouhaha let's look at the big problems first... userboxes with images and especially people who have hundreds of them on their page, 'image archives' on user or Wikiproject pages (does the 'gallery' tag make those ok or still a problem?), those little 'flag' images where you've got one for every country and they show up on userpages for each country visited or list articles for the country of every person listed, et cetera. Taking out the 'top ten' of those is likely going to accomplish more than wiping out all the other 'extra' images combined. I'm not suggesting a dev feature change... just consideration of how a particular image bearing template is used and thus whether it is likely to be a 'drop' (images on stub templates) or a 'deluge' (images on userboxes). Getting rid of the 'deluge' items makes sense. I don't think that going after every little 'drop' does. Yes, every image causes server load... but so do templates in general, wiki-markup, et cetera. An occasional image here and there for 'presentation' purposes isn't killing the servers. --CBD ☎ ✉ 15:38, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I for one am heavily dependent on the little image / flag when I'm sorting stubs. In short: if I see the image I expect to see in the bottom of the page, I just move on to the next article. This saves me a lot of time. If I always had to read the stub text my work would take a lot longer. I know this might be a trivial point, but it is relevant to me. One more reason for keeping them: Many stub articles look incredibly dull with no images or whatever on the page. I find it nice with at least one tiny image to give a litte colour. I don't believe this should be killing the servers any more than loading the Wikipedia logo. Seeing e.g. a small image of Einstein has often inspired me to look into the category and read a few more articles about physics. We should focus on the big sinners, e.g. image galleries or articles with 8-10 images. If - after that - we still have problems, then we can kill the little stub images. --Valentinian 22:16, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: i agree. the images make it far quicker to sort for the right stubs. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 02:50, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stub images 

message: Hi. I thought this javascript snippet may interest people here. When using popups, it lets you see the stub templates that are being used on the page. Lupin|talk|popups 17:15, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Using popups to see stub tags 

message: See here for an embryonic discussion on a large hole in our "speedy" criteria, in that what we have on the SFD is inconsistent with what's listing on WP:CSD, and neither is useful for ever actually deleting well-formed but never-used stub types.  If I get no further comments, I'll fix the former for consistency, and leave the latter alone, in its splendid pointlessness.  Alai 08:26, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Speedy deletion crtiteria inconsistency 

message: I cannot seem to successfully follow the link the the stub list, which I use a lot for cleanup.  Has it been moved, or is there a technical problem? SailorfromNH 18:38, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: strange - works for me, and it's still at {WP:WSS/ST]]. There were server troubles a few hours ago, but I don't see that that would cause it. Grutness...wha? 02:14, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stub list problem? 

message: I've created a new template: , to be placed instead of  at the top of stub categories.  is okay in genmeral terms but has one bad flaw for stub categories - it suggests thinking about making subcategories and discussing them in the category's talk page. Which means, of course, that we don't find out about the discussions at WP:WSS until the subcategories are made.  still suggests thinking about making subcategories, but directs the editor to WP:WSS/P rather than category talk. Please replace  with  if you see it on a stub category! Perhaps this could be done by bot...? Before that's done, though - I've left the same category on the new template () - perhaps this needs a separate category. Grutness...wha? 05:52, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sounds like a good plan.  Are we aiming to have these on all of the 90-odd oversizeds?  Alai 05:55, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: probably a good idea - certainly any which ise  should have that replaced with the new template. Grutness...wha? 05:58, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: New template

message: I've just noticed - both  and  use handcuffs as their symbol (OK, crime-stub actually uses legirons, but they look like handcuffs, and are used for the same purpose). Surely either or both could be changed to avoid confusion, and, erm, unwanted connotations? JIP | Talk 12:57, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: perhaps changing one to a burglar's mask (oh, but which one? ;). What about changing the crime one to the jail bars as used on prison-stub? Would that do the trick? Grutness...wha? 22:45, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Crime-stub and BDSM-stub 

message: is starting to creep up in size again - it's just breached the 200 barrier. Any volunteers to go in with rakes and brooms? Grutness...wha? 23:44, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: call to arms

message: This whole hierarchy seems rather pointless, duplicative, and contrary to the scope of , where it's ended up.  Off to CFD with 'em all?  Alai 01:07, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: IIRC the general rule on Wikipedia seems to be category or list. We have a list - WP:WSS/ST. This seems redundant. Also see my comments at WP:SFD re: Film-genre-stub. Grutness...wha? 04:56, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  {{cl|Stub templates}} 

message: So It seems that there are many issues with stub types being children of many other stub types...  Is there a reason behind this?  For example Christianity Biography is from generic Stub, Christian people, Christianity stubs, and Religious biography stubs.  Are not Christian people already stubs under christianity stubs and do we need all this major spiderwebbing of stub categories?  Just a bit confusing for me... Jabencarsey 01:39, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Look at it this way. Which is better - to have a  containing 200 stubs and also with five subcategories for Christian people, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, Saints, Popes, and Christian texts, each containing 200 stubs, or to just have one main category containing 1500 stubs? Which is easier for editors who know about one aspect of Christianity? The main aim of the hierarchy is to make sure that categories are a useful size for editors who know about a specific area or topic - not so large and general that they'll have to pick through hundreds of stubs they know nothing about, and not so small that a dedicated editor could clear it in a couple of days. For that reason, WP:WSS has got this hierarchy with loads of categories, each of which - ideally - should have between about 60 and 600 articles. It also helps the hardware side of Wikipedia, since templates used on thousands of articles can slow down the servers. Grutness...wha? 04:52, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

text: ah, right. yeah, I see what you mean. it's not something we've thought too much about, really. The main reason for them being subcategorised in so many places is also to make it easier for editors to find them - it doesn't mean much difficulty as far as sifting through categories is concerned, but i does make this list a bit heavy-going. We've tried to simplify the tree a little bit from time to time, but it is a problem. It may well be that the whole page will need a thorough re-vamping sometime fairly soon (when it was first made, there were only about 100 stub tyes - there are now about 1500), but unless someone comes up with a good plan for how to do that... Grutness...wha? 23:14, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Heirarchy Issues