Wikipedia talk:Stub/Archive 8

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Could Somebody Dbl-Check this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formosa,_Ontario

still a Stub? or a Short article?

I'm in favour of the latter. JimmmyThePiep 17:04, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Much, much too long to be a stub. Someone must've expanded it and forgotten to remove the tag. Grutness...wha? 00:33, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

I created the article (and the stub) a few months ago. I only added a couple of lines. Somebody put in a decent enough chunk, wouldn't you say? (I'm rather glad I started it up, because now there's all this stuff I didn't know before.) JimmmyThePiep 01:58, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Looks like a pretty good article now! :) Grutness...wha? 06:01, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Why stub categories?

why not just have a stub category for every normal category? Or just use the stub tag and automatically have the stub-category assigned by the page-category? And if there is no page-category then one could be added if there were a preexisting stub-category. why not have a script do this? Has this been discussed before? --Tim 18:08, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

1. Because that would result in the creation of thousands upon thousands of unused categories.
2. Someone would still have to create the actual category; this would result in the creation of thousands upon thousands of redlinks and uncategorized articles, and thus wouldn't actually sort stubs.
3. I don't understand your point here. I can't think of a stub category that should (or does) exist for which there is no corresponding article topic category (though the names do not always match and there is not a 1:1 relationship - many stub types "upmerge" into a larger stub category. E.g. there might be a stub for English towns and cities and a "English town and city stubs" stub category for it, but if there are only three stub articles in the "Wessex towns and cities" article sub-category, we don't need a corresponding stub and stub category for Wessex settlements more specifically; the stubs can just go in the larger "English town and city stubs" stubcat, even if the articles in question are in "Essex towns and cities" under "English towns and cities" in the article category-space.
4. Bots make mistakes, and stub template and category naming is esoteric and sometimes contentious as to details.
5. Yes.

— SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:45, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Very many times. And the answers to "why not" are very simple, some, but not all of which have been given by SMcC.:

• from the point of view of stub sorting, it would require the maintenance and patrolling of literally tens of thousands of categories and templates. it is vrtually a full-time job maintaining the 1800 or so that currently exist. To maintain that many would be impossible.
• From the point of view of general category maintenance, many stub categories would be permanently empty and therefore redundant (for example, how many articles in Category:Presidents of the United States are likely to be stubs?). Since they would be of no use, many of them should be speedily deleted - and the second they are, the whole system of a one-for-one correlation between stubcats and permcats disappears. as such, it is unworkable.
• From the point of view of the people actually using stub categories to find articles to expand, tiny fragmentations of stub type are a bad move. It is for this reason that the stub-sorting wikiproject has set optimum sizes for stub categories. Consider, for example, that you are looking for articles to expand on a specific subject. Which is easier, to look through one category with 100 stubs, one category with 10,000 stubs, or fifty categories with two or three stubs each? It is far less work for editors to have categories to search that are of sufficient size to be useful, but not so big as to be overwhelming.
• From the standpoint of the articles themselves, there is an optimum number of stub types that an article should have. There are frequently complaints if an article is marked with too many stub types, yet your proposal would end up with some articles being marked with ten or more different stubs. Consider, for example, the stub article Green-winged Pytilia. This makes for ugly articles, and the addition of many of the extra types would be counterprodctive for the editorial reasons given above.

Grutness...wha? 23:59, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Thank you both for your detailed reply. Perhaps you can humor me trying to clarify my vision of a new way of stub-ing:

SMcCandlish:

1. I'm thinking of using existing page-categories in a new way not duplicating what is there. in fact it would reduce the number of categories by merging all the page-categories and stub-categories.
2. The page-categories already exist I'm just thinking of putting them to a new use.
3. Some pages that have a stub-category but no page-category, although I can't find one now.
4. That's a problem current page-categories are handling and we would only be using what is there.

Grutness:

1. To much maintenance and patrolling could be avoided with proper use of a hierarchy like tree structure, so that all stubs in a category and sub categories can be listed on one page. We could also make it sortable by recent additions or number of pages in the category.
2. Empty stub categories would simply not be generated.
3. And people can have there choice of “look(ing) through one category with 100 stubs, one category with 10,000 stubs, or fifty categories with two or three stubs each”
4. The number of stubs listed on any article itself would be 1 “stub”, and the number of categories would be as many as there are now.

I think of it as something like this page: Category:Stub_categories but with the “Pages in category” as sortable top 100 optionally including pages in sub categories. The “Subcategories” and “Pages in category” could be sorted by activity level, number of pages contained, and alphabetically. Only page-categories with stubs would be shown. Do you see what I'm trying to get at? If I knew how to make an auto-generated wiki page, I would try to make a demo....--Tim 05:04, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

I honestly am not following you here at all. Granted it's SPDay and beer is involved, but still... I would recommend joining WP:WSS and bringing the issue up there on the project talk page. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 08:39, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

{{Expand}} and {{Stub}}

I've noticed increasing use of {{Expand}} as a surrogate stub. There's no need for an article to have both T:Espand and a stub template, and we're probably missing quite a few stubs as a result of its use as a replacement for it.

I'd like to suggest the following proposal (which would have ramifications beyond this page, so I'm double-posting this to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting and Template talk:Expand).

1. {{Expand}} should not be used on any articles with stub templates. A stub template already signals that an article should be expanded.
2. {{stub}} or one of its subtypes should be used on articles of stub length - if further expansion is required once an article is beyond this length, only then should {{Expand}} be added.

Note that {{sectstub}} and {{listdev}} are not counted as stub templates in general terms, nor are they for the purposes of this proposal. Grutness...wha? 00:55, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Strongly concur. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 03:32, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Strong agree. Oddly, I was just mentally wrestling with such a rationale. How curious to find it as the most recent addition to this talk page! NB - what about the use of the {{expert}} template with either {{Stub}} or {{Expansion}}? Watermellonman 05:07, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

I did remove all "expands" from stub pages some time ago, and met with a little resistance. But it still seems right to me. Rich Farmbrough, 11:56 23 April 2007 (GMT).

How not to stub articles...

Thought y'all might like to see this: [1]! Grutness...wha? 03:58, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

And I thought wikiproject links in articles were bad... Alai 05:41, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

request simpler instructions

Could perhaps a set of summary instructions -- as a numbered "recipe," for example -- be added near the top of the project page? It took me many minutes of "scanning" just to figure out where on the page to put the stub; the info is "hidden" in a long discussion on defining "stub". The "recipe" could start w/ a warning like "first make sure the stub-tag is appropriate -- see below". Biography peer review has a nice clear example of the kind of instructions I'm talking about.

Overall this page seems overlong -- the whole second half is a detailed how-to on creating new stub categories, but it says you shouldn't do this at all w/o first getting consensus at another page. Shouldn't there just be a link to that page and a warning? thx--Turangalila (talk) 23:05, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

• I've added a page summary section which I hope will address some of those concerns (and also put the "essential" sections into a slightly more logical order). As for removing the "how to create the template" section, that would be a big improvement IMHO, but WP:WSS already gets plenty of complains from people who think we're too autocratic - removing that section will probably only make that worse. Grutness...wha? 01:11, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

• • Grutness, have you ever been in contact with Template:Nutshell? Do you think we could possibly come up with a two or three line description which would actually do the article justice? --Sn0wflake 06:30, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

• I hadn't, but I have now :) That would be a good idea, though I think the main problem is that the whole page needs an overhaul. Turanglila's right - it's quite confusing and convoluted the way it is at the moment, and many of the items which get reported on the WP:WSS Discovery page and at SFD are from people who have misunderstood how stub types are usually made. I'll try to start working on a draft rewrite over the next few days if I get the chance. Grutness...wha? 08:45, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
  • All right, glad that I came back at a good time. It's about time for a new overhaul anyway. I made a "nutshell" template and put it up... thoughts? --Sn0wflake 04:55, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Well, my first thought is that you didn't read the next section of this page :) The new draft has a nutshell template at the top, BTW, and with further editing is now 30% shorter than WP:STUB. Grutness...wha? 05:42, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

New draft of WP:STUB

After concerns raised above about the complexity of WP:STUB, I have written a rough draft to shorten it. The new draft contains the same information, but is 25% shorter. It also removes some of the information on how to create stub templates - information which is in part responsible for the large number of "discoveries" and is also responsible (due to the misreading by some editors) of the need to trawl the non-existent Category:B stubs for stubs "about A". Please feel free to make any comments, positive or negative on my new draft (User:Grutness/WP Stub rewrite (draft) at its talk page. (crossposted to WP talk:WSS and Template talk:Stub) Grutness...wha? 00:14, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

• Ah, sorry... I truly didn't see this topic. I've made some realtively radical changes to the draft, cutting most boderline important information that was still left. Hope you can comment on the changes soon. --Sn0wflake 07:53, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Looks good - even when I'm trying to summarise something I'm still too verbose :) I've made some of the alterations you suggested to the "categorising stubs" section, too. Grutness...wha? 08:21, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
    • Made some final changes. If you think the second section is good enough, its probably ready for primetime. --Sn0wflake 08:46, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Yeah it's probably ready. What next - simply being bold and changing it over? Grutness...wha? 02:20, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
    • Well, if you don't mind, I went ahead and did it. That's quite a piece of work, man... if you want, go to the project's History and look at what there was before the first major rewrite (way tback then) and compare to this. :) That's the great think about the Wikipedia, I think. --Sn0wflake 04:02, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
  • I know it cut it from a little over ten screens-full to just under seven - that's got to be an improvement. and thanks, too - for adding it here, for your comments, and for your help in whacking it into shape :) Grutness...wha? 04:20, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
• Too tired and boggled the database-thwacking to read in detail right now, but what about refactoring the "creating" stuff more extensively (leaving just a summary paragraph), merging it in with the /NG page, and turning that into a subsidiary guideline? Alai 03:55, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
  • Sounds like a good idea. Might be as well to leave it at this "intermediate stage" until people have had a chance to comment on it further, but trimming and moving the creation stuff later might be well worth while. Grutness...wha? 04:20, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
    • Good plan. Alai 04:25, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

I didn't think this would move this fast, or would have popped in sooner. Thumbs belatedly up. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 05:11, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Stub category not working properly?

I'm sure there is a simple reason for this that I am overlooking, but could someone explain why the newly formed Category:Veterinary medicine stubs does not contain many of the articles classified as veterinary medicine stubs? See the above category in comparison to the list of articles with that stub template. Thanks. --Joelmills 02:26, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

You did things too fast for the server. By the time the server around to noticing the change on most of the articles, the combination of the template move and the change in the category caused it to get confused, with most of the articles being listed as having Template:Veterinary-med-stub as a double square bracket link rather than a double curly bracket transclusion of Template:Zoology-med-stub. A minor edit to cause the server to look again at the articles linked from Template:Zoology-med-stub should probably do the trick, and if not getting a bot to replace Zoology-med-stub with Veterinary-med-stub in the articles definitely will. As a general rule, one should give the servers time to adjust between editing a template and moving that same template. Caerwine Caer’s whines 02:52, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Interesting. It's working fine now, anyway. Is there a bot that can easily be assigned to replacing zoology-med-stub with veterinary-med-stub, or would it be less trouble just to do it by hand? There's only 85 articles, so it wouldn't be a big deal. --Joelmills 03:02, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Alai has a bot (named Alaibot that's authorized to do stub sorting related bot work. Leave him a note on his talk page and it normally will get done fairly quickly. Might be other bots that would be willing to do the work, but if so I can't remember them and haven't needed to. Caerwine Caer’s whines

Thanks. --Joelmills 03:19, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Done, and you're welcome. Where was the fire, though? I'm a bit bemused that the renaming had a "non-admin closure and change of venue to speedy": is our reputation for tardy closures already quite that bad? Alai 02:13, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure about all that. I was a latecomer to the discussion on renaming and didn't have any involvement in its closure or renaming. When I did see it had been closed, I checked the category and saw that it didn't seem to be working properly, so I came here. --Joelmills 02:46, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest you were, I was just "wondering aloud". I should probably just ask TAM/Iceflow, if my curiosity gets too much. Alai 03:03, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Substub

Since it's inactive and its template has even been long deleted, how about deleting mention of it from the page? Caerwine Caer’s whines 03:12, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Sure... why not. --Sn0wflake 03:20, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Spacing

If anyone has an explainable objection to the inclusion of "It is usually desirable for layout purposes to leave two blank lines before the first stub template.", I'd be interested in what that is. Including it may save hundreds of personhours of article cleanup going forward from now on, at the cost of 17 simple words. Check my edit history today, and you'll see hours of stub template spacing fixes. Let's just encourage proper placement to begin with. The problem is well-known, but no other solution has presented itself in a month and a half. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 06:07, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

AS discussed on our talk pages, isn't inserting a forced line break in the stub tempates a neater solution? Rich Farmbrough, 22:03 22 April 2007 (GMT).

That doesn't seem like a good idea, since it'd presumably force extra vertical space been multiple tags, as well as before the first one. And require changing several thousand stub templates, and thus cache-invalidating half the article-space... Alai 22:17, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Yep, but since multiple tags are a rarity, and spaces between stub tags wouldn't look that bad, and stub tgs shuld be temporary... ... that shouldn't be a significant problem. Rich Farmbrough, 11:59 23 April 2007 (GMT).

I'm afraid I have to disagree with just about all of that. Tens of thousands of articles is hardly a rarity, lots of stub tags aren't so very temporary in practice, and while the appearance of stub tags isn't what I'd call a significant problem in the first place, changing all those templates in order to implement a poorer solution doesn't seem especially attractive. Much better just to have the bot stop fiddling with the formatting of these things in the first place. Alai 22:04, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

(Outdent.) I did think of a solution to this problem last night actually, but it would require a major change to stub-tagging instructions. Stub tags would come in a wrapper:

{{stubtags|snooker-bio|England-sport-bio|...|...}}

Max of four, per WP:STUB. {{stubtags}} would include the needed preceding linebreak, and then add the actual stub templates. After this one would never manually use something like {{snooker-bio-stub}} ever again. It would probably take a matter of a few minutes to deploy this template, and someone with bot authority and skillz to create a bot to trawl for existing stub tags and convert them, and another to look for "blank line, blank line, {{stubtags}}" and convert that to "blank line, {{stubtags}}". Way-trivial compared to futzing with the code of thousands of stub templates, and would produce neater article source code. If given no parameters, it would just default to including {{stub}}. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 00:28, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Actually it should be {{stubs}} not {{stubtags}}; {{stubs}} is presently being used for a (rather bogus) redirect to Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 00:34, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Various things like this have been suggested before, and/or part-implemented. ({{stubbox}} and {{maintenance}} have been deleted; I think that {{multistub}} was outlined, and I think I have a version kicking around in my user space someplace.) I think it's broadly a good idea, as it'd hopefully "tidy up" the appearance of articles tagged with numerous stub templates, which is occasionally griped about, it could be tried out gradually to see if people are favourably disposed, and if there's vast enthusiasm for it, it'd be easy to convert to this format by 'bot . (Mind you, it's yet another case to cater for bots that adjust existing stub tags to deal with, as well as actual people having to get used to it.) If one wants to get really fancy, it'd be possible to create additional abbreviated templates for use in such a grouping construct, to eliminate the text that gets repeated with conventional multi-tags. There's more on this if one trawls back through the archives... Alai 02:08, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Reducing the redundant text would be pretty cool, but I'd save that for a "second wave", I think. What I envision for now wouldn't spit out anything other than whitespace and the stub tags. So anyway, how shall we get started? >;-) I'd be cool with using WP:CUE's articlespace as the guinea pig. Certainly fancier things could be done - no redundant wording, table layout, line up all the images, etc., etc., but I wasn't "going there" with this idea. PS: Going there eventually shouldn't need to require alternate stub tags, simply replacement code in the extant ones and in the "model" one. Modern nav boxes can detect the presence of and count other nav boxes; that code could be borrowed to have stub tags "notice" that others of their ilk are present. BUT, I wasn't going to go there... PPS: Yeah, the extant bots would need upgrades, but not necessarily on a short time frame. If we testbedded it on a set of aricles like WP:CUE's that are already pretty well stub sorted, it shouldn't be too painful (about the only stub sorting I can think of to do in there is getting around to creating the xxx-sport-bio-stub upmerged templates to deal with the basically useless asia-sport-bio-stub mess, as discussed elsewhere about a month ago, I think at WT:WSS but perhaps at WT:SFD. Even so, the number of affected articles could be dealt with via AWB or even manually without too much agony, so it shouldn't interfere with bot work.) — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 02:46, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

I definitely agree about the simplified wording being for the "second wave"; that'd be much more work to carry through. (Unless I'm missing some cleverer way of coding it than I'm currently thinking of -- i.e. that requires additional stub templates, just re-transcluding in another template doesn't. (Though can you expand/clarify about the 'mutual counting'?)) I think trying this out by coding the template and using it on a smallish number of articles is well within the spirit of WP:BOLD. Just hold off doing it on such a large scale that any resultant crapcyclone might not be containable. Alai 04:53, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Mutual counting: I haven't sussed out the details yet, but you can see it in action at User:SMcCandlish/Sandbox/Nav; the examples at the bottom auto-collapse because they've been told to do so in the presence of more than two additional templates of the same general sort. It won't work with old-school nav templates that are not using the newfangled code (which isn't mine). — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 04:03, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Man, that stuff is hard on the eyes... But if I'm reading {{Navbox generic}} at all correctly, it looks like it's being implemented in CSS, not (directly) in raw markup: Wikipedia:NavFrame#Collapsible tables. So if there's a fix possible on those lines, the good news is that it wouldn't involve changing any stub template code at all (yay), but it'd mean puzzling out the CSS arcana (boo) and buttering up a shell-access-level dev to actually make the change. (Usual big disclaimers on my understanding of this.) Alai 04:39, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

If we get to a phase where we want to implement something like that, I can probably suss out the CSS stuff. I eat CSS for breakfast. >;-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 05:45, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Handy. So do you think it's feasible to do? Alai 06:11, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Very feasible. All we need are two CSS lines. (Note: The following will not work in IE 6-, but is supposed to work in IE 7 and Firefox and most other current browsers.)

#stub {margin-top:1en}

#stub + #stub {margin-top:0en}

Of course, if we're going to that trouble, we might want to also get the shell-access-level dev to change things from #stub to .stub and replace id="stub" in the stub templates with class="stub". We could also simplify some of the stub template code by taking the CSS that now gets manually added to each template (i.e. <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="background-color: transparent;"> or style="clear:both;" and include that in the master CSS as well. Caerwine Caer’s whines 09:51, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Looks very cool. Should we try to be more generic at all? Rich Farmbrough, 12:31 24 April 2007 (GMT).

All Greek to me, but if it does what it says on the tin, and if we can get someone to implement it over the squeals of the IE refuseniks, great. Alai 18:54, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

What Caerwine said. :-) As for old-IE peeps, the change won't do anthing bad for them, they simply won't benefit from it. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 04:11, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Better and better. So who has their Badge of Dev Impressing on? Or dare I say, "CRO"? Alai 05:22, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

I think most of these double-spaces are likely to get removed by mindful editors not aware that it is theorically desirable to include them... but whatever, right. --Sn0wflake 22:21, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

At the risk of repeating myself from immediately above... if an actual live editor actually feels the article looks better without the double-space, which will often squish the tag right up against the article text, then I don't feel the need to get on their case about it. If they're not looking at the effects of their edits, they're hardly "mindful" in such cases. What seems certain is that bots are neither making aesthetic judgements, nor being mindful. Alai 22:48, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

And it's been my rather extensive experience that manual removal the double-spacing is very rare, and rarely re-applied when reverted with an explanation why not to remove it. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 04:16, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Multistub coding

I'm strongly against any "multistub"/"stubtags"-type system, for purely practical reasons. Things like {{stubtags}} have been suggested before, but there are several really serious problems with it that make it undesirable - the put it extremely mildly. First, it makes the sudden appearance of new varieties of stub much more likely, since people can enter pretty much what they wish as a stub name without having to check whether or not it is an existing stub (and as someone who empties out Category:B stubs almost daily due to people misunderstanding how to use stub templates, I can assure you this would happen very frequently). Second, the idea of a single template that would theoretically be used on all stubs seems like a very bad idea as far as the servers are concerned - there are occasional comments that having more than a couple of thousand articles using a template are a problem for servers - having theoretically all future stubs using the one template is frankly terrifying as far as its potential effect is concerned. Thirdly, it renders several methods of counting up the number of stubs marked in a particular way useless. Compared with the occasional grumbling about multi-stubbed articles (something I haven't heard from anyone for several months, BTW), breaking the servers and the rapid proliferation of duplicate and/or ridiculously undersized stub types seems a very poor alternative indeed. Sadly, I can't see any way that adding a couple of blank lines to individual stub coding would work well, since it would also add two blank lines between any two stub templates placed on the same page. The only thing I can think of is something which also has the same "thousands of articles" problem as multistub - creating a template (say {{[[Template:_|_]]}}) which would be placed before the first stub type (e.g., {{b|UK-bio-stub}}) that would work the same way as either <br> or blanking two lines).Hoever, I don't really see it would save any more space than simply adding two blank lines whenever we find they are missing. Grutness...wha? 06:56, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

I think you're conflating this with previous attempts that have (for example) been parameterised by category, which is quite a different proposition. If it's parameterised by template, then using an incorrect name would simply produce the same result as at present: a Template:no-such-stub redlink. (Or a bespoke one, if one wants to get more "esoteric" in one's template coding: anyone care for "STUB TEMPLATE ERROR!!!" in three-foot blinking red letters?) It would under no circumstances whatsoever generate category redlinks, or populations in non-existent categories. Secondly, this wouldn't ever be used on the majority of stubs, since only a (relatively) small minority of stubs are tagged with more than one such, and I'm assuming there'd be little impetus to have "single template multi-stubs". (That would still be potentially quite a lot of transclusions, but nothing nearly so server-busting as those in use by various 1.0ish monstrosities, and whatever else it is that regularly has the job queue over 100,000, or ever over 2,000,000.) Third: I assume you mean using "what links here" (the other being looking in the category, which I assume isn't what you intend.) So far as I can see, that wouldn't be affected in any way (much less rendered useless) since that lists indirect transclusions, too.

I don't see the "two blank lines" thing as a pressing reason to do this (especially as it'd presumbly never be anything like a complete one, for the reason mentioned above), but I think it's worth exploring in the context of the larger "appearance of multistubs" issue. Admittedly those do seem to have died down a bit (at least as they're manifest here -- no doubt they're mutting on mailing lists, and scheming on IRC...). Alai 07:35, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

I think Alai said pretty much what I would. In summary: I don't see that an "I'm strongly against any..." generalization is too helpful. :-) The code I proposed would not have any effect at all, that I can see, on the issue of non-existent stub names or creation of bogus new stubs; the resulting appearance of a typo would be precisely the same as it is now: A "Template:foo-bar-baz" redlink. It's just a very, very simple wrapper around existing stub tags. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 04:16, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Oh, and for context: it's not so much that double-spaces are in any way hard to add, but that they're being removed on an industrial scale by SmackBot. Not in isolation, but in the course of making other edits (... that I also don't really see the point of currently, I must admit). Alai 07:54, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be simple enough to get someone to re-specify what SmackBot does so that it doesn't remove double blank lines before templates with names containing the character string "stub"? Surely that would be a far easier solution than trying to hard-code two lines into stub templates. I take your point about the multistub template, BTW, although I still feel it would be extremely heavy use. I'd say 10% of stub articles are double or triple stubbed, if not more, and given the exponential growth of Wikipedia... there are a couple of hundred thousand more stubs here than this time last year - for every 100,000 new stubs that would mean 10,000+ uses of this template. I'd guesstimate that after a year of use it would probably have 25-30,000 articles marked with it. Grutness...wha? 10:17, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

You'd think: it appears that SB is something of a hostage to AWB on this, which seems to have started doing this for no especially evident reason. Rich has kindly agreed to turn off AWB's "general fixes" for the time being. The scope for its use would certainly be into the tens of thousands, but that's not that drastic in and of itself. Well into "high risk template" territory, yes. Alai 10:37, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

There are, though, other problems with leading double space, although stub templates are supposed to be temporary, and we could stand a little bit of unaestheic layout with them, and those are that , by and large, people won't put them in, otherwise sensible processes and people may remove them, and it's another thing to remember. I'm sure additional thought to the layout of the stub templates can solve this one. I'll ask Azatoth if he has any ideas. Rich Farmbrough, 12:07 23 April 2007 (GMT).

That was what inspired the "wrapper" idea; just fix the issue for them. User never have to deal with it, bots wouldn't either, and stub tagging would actually be easier in many cases: {{stubs|snooker-bio|Germany-sport-bio}} is appreciably shorter than {{snooker-bio-stub}}(newline){{Germany-sport-bio-stub}}, while {{stubs|snooker-bio}} is only one character longer than {{snooker-bio-stub}} — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 04:16, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Another possibility, which has been part talked about already, involves standard HTML seperators that have been proposed (and used manually) for cats and interwikis. One for stub tags could have a hard coded break after it. Not a zero, or inded that low cost solution, but zero cost if the other proposal is worth doing automatically, and the break is unlikelty to be removed. Rich Farmbrough, 12:16 23 April 2007 (GMT).

It's not really a problem if people forget to put them in, and it seems rare that people ever take them out by hand; probably because in either case they can see the visual effect of doing so, and will be likely to leave the article in a state where at least they are happy with it. But it's rather demoralising when they're stripped out by automated processes for no particular reason, and seems pretty reasonable to ask that they desist, at least until such time as there's a different solution in place. I'd hate to see people start employing hrules and other unduly intrusive formatting hacks just on the basis of making the articles "bot-resistant". Alai 22:18, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

I dind't mean hrles! I meant HTML comments. like < -- Interwikis -- > < -- Categories -- > . Rich Farmbrough, 12:04 24 April 2007 (GMT).

I was just speculating as to what people might do, if left to their own devices. (I've seen hrules used in this way on occasion.) Alai 05:20, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Direct copying is not always a copyright violation

The article says "directly copying other sources is a violation of copyright". It may be improper (plagiarism) but it isn't always a violation of copyright. If the source is in the public domain, or the license terms of the source permit unrestricted copying, then directly copying is not a violation. Paul Koning 15:47, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Correct, of course - a good point. I've amended the page to deal with this. Grutness...wha? 22:51, 30 April 2007 (UTC)