Wikipedia talk:Stub/Archive 7

message: For those of you who are familiar with the perennial proposals to add sortkeys to bio-stub templates, somehow, may I please direct your attention to a story in this week's Signpost.
:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-01-02/Technology report
For the lazy, there is a new magic word, , which changes the default sortkey in all categories included in an article.  I presume that this will soon begin popping up on stubs Real Soon Now; don't be alarmed, this is sanctioned.  Indeed, presumably its use will soon become ubiquitous on biographical articles.  —CComMack (t–c) 08:19, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  An end (?) to the biography sortkey debate 

message: I think it's about time this page was protected again, but I'd like a couple more comments rather than being bold and doing it unilaterally. Sure, it's nice to be able to have people come along and add info to the page, but the  24 edits since protection was removed in late December contain eleven vandalisms, eleven reversions, and only two genuine alterations. Grutness...wha? 00:19, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Having looked at the history, semi-protection does seem like a good idea. (Though I was quite amused by the "I love sex!!! Don't you love when that big dick goes into a nice soft oochie? I do!! Start getting physical in bed NOW!!!" edit). --TheParanoidOne 06:32, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Page protection?

message: I suggest we "officialise" top-sorting stub templates, since the practice seems to be increasingly widespread and accepted, and when it's not done, I think it increase the temptation of people "fixing" the categorisation of the template in some way that's much worse (includeonlying the whole thing, noincluding a mini-essay, or breaking the sort key, thereby making the whole category unusable).  On a largely unrelated point, I'd also suggest getting rid of "plainlinks", which seems to have crept in without discussion, seems to me deeply illogical, has very little uptake, and  is inconsistent with metastub, so we should at any rate change one of them.  Alai 15:57, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Top-sorting stub templates, and plainlinks 

message: Would a subject not warrant its own article if there weren't enough reliable sources on the topic in known existence to make it much more than a stub? In such cases, would merging and redirecting be recommended? If that's the case, then so much of Wikipedia consists of stubs that should really be part of other, bigger articles. At least, this is the impression I get about how Wikipedia should ideally be according to its own guidelines (not my personal ideal particularly, although it's better than deleting stubs)...--h i s   s p a c e   r e s e a r c h 08:41, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, some stubs are far better merged with larger articles, and merging is one of the possible things that can be done with stubs. But I'd say it's only a small number of stubs that it makes sense to do this with - perhaps 10% at most. Similarly, some stubs need deletion, but rarely if ever simply because they're stubs - usually stubs are only deleted if there are major other problems with them - a lack of notability, unverifiability, or for other reasons related to thei unencyclopedic nature. A stub that has verifiable information, no matter how little of it there is, is still a viable article, even if it is unlikely that it can ever be expanded into something much more than the barest outline. And usually that is a far better solution than trying to force-merge the information into an article where it becomes just  some form of aside or digression from the main subject of that article. Grutness...wha? 04:52, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. Some subjects have reliable sources available, and are more than dictionary definitions, but really don't need more than two or three paragraphs. -- Donald Albury 03:24, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Stubs and Merging them into bigger articles 

message: Shawnkielty 10:33, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: See Help:Starting a new page and Wikipedia:Your first article. You can then add  to it, or find more suitable template from :Category:Stub categories. Prolog 11:53, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Unless you mean "How do I create a new stub template", in  which case see the comments in the section immediately above this, headed "How to make a stub label". Grutness...wha? 01:02, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  how do I create a new Stub?  

message: Perhaps it should be "grow" the article rather than "expand"? ("Harmless humour") Jackiespeel 19:21, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: already makes that (alleged) joke.  Or were you going for twice in the same sentence? :)  Alai 02:38, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Plant stub

message: Please be aware of Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/UncatTemplateBot, which would effectively imply a change in the coding for stubs (additional categorisation).  Alai 02:41, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Uncategorised-tagging of stub templates 

message: Why? Labelling something a stub is pretty much the most meta of metadata, to me.  But perhaps more the point, if you don't put the stubs at the very end and in fact put two blank lines between the stubs and everthing else before it, the stub templates butt up against the (last) nav template if any.  Wasn't going to advise double-spacing right here in hopes of fixing that elsewhere, but it remains a problem. Not a huge deal I guess, and if that's the only objection to the major edit I just made, I s'pose I won't complain much. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:21, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's for ease of use, mainly. Interwiki links are often added by people who aren't regular editors of en.wiki and may not have English as a strong language. Keeping things as simple as possible for them by making the interwiki links the very last thing on the page makes a lot of sense from that point of view. Overall, though, it's no biggie, and you're right about the gap. Grutness...wha? 23:19, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: "But before the inter-Wiki links"