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Introduction to Creating stub types

At the moment, the first paragraph of Creating stub types reads:

In general, a stub type consists of a stub template and a dedicated stub category, although "upmerged" templates are also occasionally created which feed into more general stub categories.

I think we should change this to remove the part after the comma; I don't think it's obvious to an inexperienced Wikipedian what that means, and so I think it makes the opening more complicated than it needs to be.

"Upmerging" is explained in New stub templates, a couple of paragraphs down, so a reader will still get the information. I just don't think it's important enough to need to be in the first sentence.

When I edited that part of the page, I was trying to make it more clear and understandable to someone who might not have a great understanding of templates, categories, and other concepts specific to (or needing knowledge of) Wikipedia. I think the plainer we can get the message across, the better :)

Thanks very much, and well done on all your work! Drum guy (talk) 21:12, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I understand what yyou mean, but I do think it's a bit of an oversimplification not to mention upmerging there, since it's become a very common way (possibly the usual way) of creating stub types in recent months. Perhaps a solution might be to put an internal link to Wikipedia:Glossary#Upmerge on that word. Grutness...wha? 22:30, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Hidden categories discussion

There is a discussion underway at Wikipedia talk:Categorization#Hidden categories concerning what kinds of categories should be hidden (using the new HIDDENCAT magic word). For the moment it is proposed that hiding be applied to all categories which classify the article rather than the article subject (i.e. maintenance cats, stub cats, "Spoken articles" etc.) Please weigh in. --Kotniski (talk) 08:51, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

how big can a stub be?

At what point is a stub no longer a stub? Is there a simple mathematic solution? Like once it hits 7,500 bytes? I am sure this has been discussed. Kingturtle (talk) 23:48, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

It has been discussed before, though there's never really been any consensus. It's certainly not a strictly mathematical thing - it's more a fairly arbitrary 'feel"; some artuicles marked as stubs and some not marked as stubs look quite similar, since the borderline is pretty fuzzy. Stub sorters tend to take several things into consideration which make a purely mathematiucal approach impossible: does the article contain just one paragraph and then a list of examples, for instance? If it does, then the body of the article can really be considered to be just the paragraph, and the article is marked as a stub - even if the list is quite long. Similarly, articles with just a small amount of text and a lot of infoboxes is still likely to be a stub. The subject matter is important, too - an article like Croughton, Northamptonshire says all that you really need to say about the village, so it isn't a stub; an article of the same length on New York, though, would definitely be a stub. Grutness...wha? 01:40, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Does anyone have more info? --Camaeron (talk) 18:18, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Have a look through the archives of this page and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting - I'm sure you'll find some of the previous discussions on this there. Grutness...wha? 21:38, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

a more careful way to talk about "plagiarism"

Just a small comment about the statement that "directly copying other sources is plagiarism". I think it should say something more like "directly copying from other sources without proper attribution is plagiarism". However, I thought it might be better to get some comments here first before making that change. (unlike, a small tweak that I made today in the same section, -- the section "Ideal stub article" -- where I was more confident it was right. It was just a change to a hyper link.) Any comments? Would this be a good change? Thanks, Mike Schwartz (talk) 17:49, 3 April 2008 (UTC) tweaked slightly 17:52, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Even with proper attribution, direct copying is still plagiarism. The only way to avoid plagiarism is to attribute and reword. There are numerous examples of things that have been speedily deleted as copyvios where they've been copied directly from a webpage and simply added the website address as an attribution. Grutness...wha? 00:29, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Image sizes: let's standardise

Can we pick a maximum image size, and stick with it? I've been using 40x30px on the many, many stub templates I've had cause to edit for this or some other initial reason, but there's no "official" guidance on this, beyond the word "small". I'd rather we standardised on some other size than we fail to standardise at all, however. I think that using an ad hoc variety of sizes looks unnecessarily scrappy on pages where there's multi-stubbing, and we absolutely do not want to get into the size equivalent of "loudness wars". Alai (talk) 01:11, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

As I hinted in the proposal discussion for netball-stub, some icons are better in other than "landscape format". I think if we make it clear that the larger dimension is 40px, then it will standardise to a large extent. I've certainly noobjection to icons being 40x20, 40x40 or 30x40 if those are easier to handle than 40x30. Consider the flags used for national icons, for instance. You can't have a 40x30 icon for most of those without altering the official dimensions of the flags (the Union Jack would have to be 40x20, and Nepal's flag would have to be 30x40, to start with). And then there's the problem with icons using maps - how do you turn a map of Chile into a 40x30 icon? If we stipulate a maximum for the longer dimension, but allow leeway for the other dimension, then the "loudness" problem will disappear to a large extent, and it'll still get rid of things like the {{California Desert-geo-stub}} icon. Grutness...wha? 02:04, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I strongly suggest we stick with "landscape" dimensions, and re-crop images to suit, if that shrinks them too much to be clear. The alternative would still look significantly jumbled, and 40x40 is for my money certainly too big. Clarity is not really an issue with flags, which should obviously retain their original ratios. It's certainly not necessary to "turn images into" 40x30: I'm suggesting that as bounds, not a "stretch to fit" size. Alai (talk) 02:36, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

It's certainly doesn't look a jumble if there is a maximum dimension given, and some images simply look wrong in landscape format. I still say that as long as the maximum dimension's size is specified, that in itself is enough to standardise images. If you stick with 40x30 as maxima, then either you have to stretch icons to fit both maxima, or some icons are clearly going to be far smaller than others, and the result will be far more of a jumble. Any vertically oriented icons would be significantly smaller than landscape-format ones, since they would only be allowed to fall within the 30 pixel height maximum. Which would mean far more variation in icon size than simply specifying a size for whichever is the maximum dimension. Grutness...wha? 00:40, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

A mixture of 40x30, 30x40 and 40x40 on a page is, IMO, precisely a "jumble". It'd be worse than the status quo, if it caused a further proliferation of the latter two, and the jumbliness of said status quo is precisely what I'm here to argue against. It also introduces a perverse incentive to re-crop images to 40x40. I'm absolutely not advocating stretching images to fit 40x30. That's not the most straightforward thing to do, and nor is there any point to it. Some vertically-oriented images will indeed look a little cramped at 40x30, certainly. If excessively so, I strongly suggest either recropping, or simply using a different image. (In the case of Chile, use of the flag instead of, or as well as, the map spring to mind) That vertically-oriented, size-constrained images end up smaller is much less of an issue, I think, because it doesn't create radical misalignment of text, or a large visual intrusion, in the way "too big" images do. Certainly no worse than the fair numerous templates with no image.

Perhaps this is yet another issue we'll have to wait until there's an odd number of people with strong views on the matter. Or at any rate, more than two. Alai (talk) 16:31, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Add standard rules to WP:STUB

I would like to add the following to the bottom of "Basic information", right above "1.1 Ideal stub article"

Like all articles, stubs must conform to Wikipedia policies, particularly those governing content and style.

Comments? davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 04:36, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Seems a little redundant. It's not feasible or desirable to have every policy or guideline to cross-reference every other such, however orthogonal, and there certainly seems to be near-complete orthogonality going on here. If anything, we could start to prune out, or refactor elsewhere, a good deal of the existing material. Alai (talk) 17:42, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

AWB putting stubs below cats

I'm getting frequently annoyed witnessing AWB users making pointless edits by moving stub templates below categories. See Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs#AWB_reverting_order_of_stubs_and_cats. Anyway, articles are rendered in such a way that the message "This article is a stub" appear above the categories. Please change this "policy" to the reflect this fact. -- Matthead  Discuß   14:40, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Please note that placing the stub templates below the categories is deliberate, since browsing categories then are placed before stub categories in the list of categories, as is only right and dnatural, and as has been requested by many editors over the last few years. The position of the stub message is irrelevant. You might as well say "why are coordinate templates placed alongside the references of an article when the coordinates themselves appear at the top of the page?" - in fact, you'd have more reasons to ask that, since the positioning of the stub templates actually serve the positive purpose of setting the order for the categories to appear. Stubs go where they do for good reason, and should continue to do so for exactly the same reason. Grutness...wha? 00:56, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. That said, it would be pushing the AWB rules a little to make an edit that just fixes this order. Most stubs have at least something else wrong with them anyway. BigBlueFish (talk) 13:17, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

It has been requested that no stub categories are visible at all to the reader, as these are only for internal Wikipedia maintenance purposes, and not about the article's subject. The order of categories is highly arbitrary anyway. As with the fixed position of the coordinates, the stub message always appears above the categories, and I don't expect to have the stub template source code hidden below the categories. In most cases, stub templates were placed by the user who started the article, in order to draw attention to the fact that it needs to be expanded, verified, improved, copy-edited. Those who encounter a stub category in a prominent place should improve the article's content, just pushing the stub to the rear does not improve the article at all, and ignores the reason why it was declared a stub in the first place. Its purpose is to expand and improve an article beyond stub status, rather than its position triggering edit wars between bots and mere humans. Thus, edits with that semi-automatic AWB tool just to re-shuffle the order like this annoy me - and not only me [1] as the AWB user was warned. He states on his user page GOAL : 1,000,000 edits as well as the trust and respect of the Wikipedia community. Also to be an admin by the time I'm entering high school.

Based on this, I suggest that the first section in Wikipedia:Stub#Categorizing_stubs is altered to

After writing a short article, or finding an unmarked stub, you should insert a stub template. By convention this is placed after the External links section and two blank lines, and above any navigation templates, and the category tags. The stub category will appear first to draw attention to the fact that the article is in need of improvement.

Hope this helps. BTW, there are also users who put stub templates into article sections they consider to short. -- Matthead  Discuß   14:24, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

well, it certainly helps to clarify that you may not fully understand the rationale behind stub templates. They are not there to indicate that the article needs to be "expanded, verified, improved, copy-edited" - they are for sorting articles that are tiny and require significant extension only by subject. Other templates perform the other functions you mention, and articles requiring them alone should not be given stub templates. You also seem to miss the dichotomy of Wikipedia's roles - it has to primarily cater for readers while simultaneously allowing editors to work. As such, templates and categories relating to readership have precedence within an article. They should never, ever be placed above navigation templates, as navigation templates are for the benefit of readers, whereas stub templates are for the benefit of editors. Adding a stub template in the middle of an article (which it would be if it were before the navigation templates) defeats that purpose. Similarly, user-specific categories should be placed before editor-specific categories, and as such the stub category needs to go after the category tags in order for this to happen. As such, the correct place for stub templates is below both the navigation templates and category links. It could possibly be noted as well that - though the guidelines of WP:ITANNOYSME relate primarily to deletion process pages,m they can apply equally well to policy and guidelines which have been decided after long discussion and "work on the ground" from people who actually regularly use the templates in question - as is the case here.

As for people using stub templates for sections of articles, that is true, but when stub sorters find such erroneous placements they usually ask those editors to use the correct {{sect-expand}} template instead.

The question of whether this should be done by AWB is another matter (as is the discussion about hiding stub categories) - stub-sorters reposition templates by hand as a matter of course during their sorting, though I see no problem with it being done by AWB if it is part of a larger program (such as changing the name of a stub template). Doing this alone using AWB is, however, likely a misuse of that tool.

BTW, I would suggest that - as indicated at the top of this page - you take your concerns to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting, since it's likely that many more of the people who work with stubs watch that page than this one. Grutness...wha? 01:08, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Proposal

Change the link "expanding it" from [{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=edit}} expanding it] to a short, animated tutorial like on the French wikipedia, see the template at the top of fr:Fuck for Forest or fr:Banque cantonale du Valais. "ébauche" means "draft" which is equivalent to "stub"? "Comment" in French, means "How", so instead of a link to "expanding it" (edit this page) make a link to "how" with a short tutorial, like the one at fr:Aide:Comment modifier une page (english translation). Notice the emphasis on including an edit summary. 199.125.109.126 (talk) 15:38, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Wow, but that takes a lot of space and really dominates the article! I'm amazed that you'd want something that big and dominating at the top of an article. Looks like a really poor example of a stub message to me... It's also worth noting that a lot of older browsers (still undoubtedly used by some Wikipedians) have a great deal of difficulty with animated images, as can people on dial-up. I'd be against any such changes. Grutness...wha? 00:48, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Oh I'm not suggesting changing the location or size of the template, just make the link go to a tutorial on editing instead of going to the edit tab. If you don't like the animation you don't have to use it, but I like it. Does the english wikipedia even have a similar tutorial on editing? 199.125.109.34 (talk) 07:22, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Ah - I misunderstood you, sorry. Yes, there is such a page (Wikipedia:Writing better articles) - that does make some sense, since there's always an edit link at the top of the page anyway. Grutness...wha? 00:54, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

That page is way, way, way too long for this purpose. We need one like on the French Wikipedia. 199.125.109.120 (talk) 06:13, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Here is a shorter one. Use this link: "You can help Wikipedia by expanding it." 199.125.109.120 (talk) 06:39, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

My (bad) translation of the message in the French stub is: "This article is a pornography, environment and Internet stub. You can share your knowledge by improving it (How?)". My preference for what we might link to if we don't link to the edit tab would be either the WP:Tutorial or one of the editor assistance pages; there's also a chat room available for new editors. But people can find these things if they're looking for them; the reason that pointing people to the edit tab works, more or less, is that the people who might correct someone are generally very friendly about it. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 13:15, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Well the first part of course was just from the category that the stub was in. You can summarize the words "You can share your knowledge" by saying "you can help". "How" is more useful than "edit". The advantage of the french link is that is that it goes to a one page tutorial. If we could summarize wp:tutorial in one page that would be the best link. Barring that, a link to wp:Tutorial would be a big improvement to a link to "edit this page". It would be good to update the intro at the tutorial to let people know why they were sent there. See I couldn't care less about "becoming a Wikipedian" ("Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited encyclopedia to which you can contribute. This tutorial will help you become a Wikipedian."), but I do want to know how I can expand a stub article, and just taking me directly to the edit link is not very helpful. 199.125.109.122 (talk) 05:32, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Good points. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 00:01, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

id="stub"

Because the box standard for stub templates is apparently to wrap them inside a <div class="boilerplate metadata" id="stub">, XHTML errors are generated by pages containing multiple stub templates, as all id attributes on a page should be unique. This concern was raised at the village pump and I offered two possible solutions, so I invite everyone interested in stub template formats to comment here. — CharlotteWebb 13:42, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

When to Make an Existing Page a Stub?

I was looking at Vice_Fund and determined it lacked content and should probably marked as a stub. I did not really see guidelines on this page for when we should mark existing pages as stubs. Please consider adding guidelines for this situation.

It's pretty thoroughly covered by the page already. Wikipedia:Stub#Basic information states what a stub is, and Wikipedia:Stub#Categorizing stubs says what to do when you find an unmarked stub. I'm not sure how we'd cover it more effectively than that. Grutness...wha? 01:47, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Category:Stubs and {{Stub}}

Why are these still around if they're deprecated? I removed the last few instances of {{stub}} just now and boldly nominated both the template and category for deletion. Since they're deprecated, I see no use in keeping them around. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • ^{(Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP)} 00:05, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

• Wait a couple of days, there'll be more articles in there. The stub-sorter's task is to get as many of them out as possible - at the moment we're just doing a good job :) Next data-dump, there'll be a couple of thousand more articles in here. Grutness...wha? 00:57, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

"Stubs" longer than War and Peace

There really isn't any rule requiring all articles, no matter how long, to be officially labeled "stubs". That seems obvious, but maybe actions speak louder than words.

I just looked at Category:Mathematics stubs. It says:

You can help by expanding them.

But the usual way to help in these cases is to remove the template that says that the long long long article is a stub.

This is a very widespread thing. It needs to get addressed in a systematic way. Is someone doing that? Are there bots or WikiProjects or something intended to put a stop to the competition for the title of World's Longest "Stub"? Michael Hardy (talk) 20:04, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Bots can't do the job, becuase the point at which an article stops being a stub varies from article to article (see my short essay User:Grutness/Croughton-London rule of stubs). Also, you've got to remember that the leength of a stub depends largely on the length of the text of the article - a lot of articles which are still stubs have one or two sentences followed by a lot of things which are peripheral to the text, such as a list of examples. Mathematics stubs are often like this - a very small amount of text followed by a large amount of equation (take Branching theorem as a typical example - two sentences, followed by a long equation. Only the two sentences are used in defining the stub). Given the amount of expert knowledge that is often needed to decide whether an arfticle on a particular subject is still a stub, a lot of that is left to people who know the subject area. However, many cases are obvious and the templates are removed by stub-sorters, and, as it says at WP:STUB, anyone can remove a stub template. I must say, though, that the dozen or so stubs I looked at at random in Category:Mathematics stubs all seem to be pretty short even with equations. Grutness...wha? 01:57, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Bots can help. Obviously a bot cannot decide whether an article qualifies as a "stub". But bots could identify long articles labeled "stubs" and call those to the attention of humans who could then consider whether to delete the "sub" notices. Michael Hardy (talk) 15:01, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Changes to "New stub templates" section

I've made a few changes to the "New stub templates section", most importantly removing the section on {{metastub}} and adding in a guideline on the size of stub icons. I removed the metastub section for two reasons: firstly, it's not how stub templates are usually created, and secondly, a lot of editors clearly have problems understanding it - I regularly check the nonexistent Category:B stubs and frequently find considerable numbers of stubs "relating to A" categorised in there. Grutness...wha? 01:06, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

stub syntax

Stub syntax (e.g., what code do you actually insert into a document to designate it as a stub?) should be highlighted as an obvious entry in (near the top of) this article. (I can't even find it AT ALL in this article, except for the example of how to invoke a particular template, e.g., the example for {{Writers-stub}}.

Can't you just put "{{stub}}" (no quotes) in an article to designate an article as a stub? If so (or whatever the syntax is), this info should be prominently included in the FIRST PARAGRAPH of this entry. Anyone agree? philiptdotcom (talk) 20:15, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

It's all there, in "Categorising stubs" - though that section should probably have a better title - I've changed the heading of that section to "How to mark an article as a stub". Grutness...wha? 22:32, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Zaranoff is a alchoholic drink. People prefer it with a little squess of Faxe kondi. Tests has showed that peole prefer it with a Faxe Knondi. (panel of 8 people). in general it i very comfortable to be intoxicated by exactly that drink. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.242.107.38 (talk) 23:40, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Stub placement

How hard and fast is the stub placement protocol. I find that many sports articles that contain navboxes look better with a stub immediately below the external links but filling any gap between links and the navbox. Just wondering if there is any flexibility on this or whether it is a hard and fast rule. Beyond the aesthetic reasons I believe it would increase the improve of stub-rated articles as more people would read the stub and expand the article.Londo06 15:29, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Stub templates should never go above navboxes. A navbox is part of an article, and stub templates should go after the end of the article. They also need to go below categories so that the stub categories appear last in the category list. As far as aesthetics are concerned, there's clearly two schoiols of though on it (I for one think that it looks ugly when I see a stub template above a navbox). Grutness...wha? 22:40, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

I think Londo means the "footer"-style navboxes. Her Pegship (tis herself) 23:10, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that's what I thought he meant. Stub templates still belong below them and don't look right above them, even the footer type. Grutness...wha? 01:06, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

I did mean the footer type. I believe when placed above naboxes they look bad for a full, more rounded article. But for a real stub, where an infobox leaves half a page of white space I believe the stub fits in nicely and encourages editors to improve the work already done.Londo06 19:01, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

Point of usage? "Nice layout" or Visability?

I visited this page to raise the same question as Londo06, and maybe propose to place the stub-template above the "footer nav-boxes"! For it to make any impact on the reader to actually see it and maybe expand the article, this is for the better IMO... Look at this article about Ron Lewin; here I didn't see the template, so I moved it to the "white space" between the References and the "footer nav-boxes". Anyone see what I mean? lil2mas (talk) 01:02, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I do, and I see it's already been put it back at the bottom. A stub template indicates to readers "this is the end of the article, there's nothing more to look at"... such as no navboxes. The stub template needs to go under the categories for another reason, too, so that stub categories atre the last ones listed. Grutness...wha? 22:36, 30 November 2008 (UTC)