Wikipedia talk:The perfect stub article

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This is nonsense. Cf. my user page. --Keichwa 19:27, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC). From my user talk page:

I think readers do not deserve such a treatment. Readers will see that an article like this one is short - no need to tell them about it. Readers are not that stupid as some one like me and you might think. Thus, please stay away from this "policey" of adding stub notes. --Keichwa 19:24, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I think the boilerplate convention and possibly automatic stub detection (by default) should be done away with. An article is a stub if the author says it's a stub. The edit page should have a check box that lets the author designate the article is a stub. I might write a page-long article and still call it a stub, because it's actually an outline of what needs to be a much longer article.

 Phr 11:14, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)phr

Old Talk

I agree completely with all of these aspects, but sometimes I come across a page that a) is completely blank, and b) I know absolutely nothing about. So... I put the word stub in. My reasons for this are that at any point I can use the search engine to search on "stub" and hence find out what stub articles are around. I can then choose one to fix. -- ManningBartlett

This is surely very confusing to new readers; I recommend against this practice. We should bear them in mind whenever we work on very short or otherwise totally inadequate articles. Imagine you came across Wikipedia for the first time, went to an alleged article about your favorite topic, and just found the word "stub." In Magnus's wiki, there's an automatic stub lister. --User:LMS

I agree with LMS. I was putting this on pages: [[Wikipedia:Perfect stub article|Stub]], creating a link to this page like so: Stub. I still think there needs to be some way in the article to acknowledge that the article is a less-than-perfect (or even a perfect) stub. A stub is still a stub. Sigh. I look forward to the rollover to Magnus' software. When did you say that would be? :-) <>< User:tbc

If I can suggest - put in a placeholder for the history of the subject. One of the great weaknesses of wikipedia currently is that (often) there's no history of a viewpoint - also one of the best ways to encourage NPOV is to detail the history of a viewpoint and thus implicitly give the reasoning behind it rather than exposit it on the reader wholesale, which often appears biased.- User:Iwnbap

I suggest that the perfect stub should usually include a link back to the referring page. This might not be relevant in all cases, but it would provide browsers and editors with a measure of context. -- User:Cayzle

Deleted Material

Much of the previous material on how to write a good stub seems more appropriate for inclusion in a general manual of how to write good articles. I have removed them because I don't think it is as important for a stub to be polished, so much as it is important for a stub to get things started. However, in case others think the points below worthy of re-inclusion (or moving to some general style page), I have included them below. ---Karl Juhnke 23:09 Aug 25, 2002 (PDT)

It did need some pruning, but I restored a couple of the points. See below. --Stephen Gilbert

IOW, Stephen says to put in points that have general application but also need to be emphasised for stub articles. That seems like a fair policy. — Toby 08:24 Sep 13, 2002 (UTC)

Follow the standards of proper English. Write in full, clear sentences.
- Restored. In my experience, many people doing "just a quick stub" resort to phrases as opposed to the full sentences they use in major articles.
Make sure any relevant linkable words have been linked. But be careful about which words you link to; see naming conventions.
- Restored. Links are often left out of stubs. Link, link, link! :)
Do not simply repeat the title in the article, except as part of a full sentence. The article already has a title, at the top of the page.
Make the first sentence a full sentence, which repeats the topic title in bold.
Make sure that your topic (and therefore your definition) is one on which we are going to want an actual encyclopedia article. In other words, bear in mind that Wikipedia is not a dictionary. There are probably only two (closely-related) sorts of article that will consist of just a definition. First, jargon. In some cases it will be fine and quite useful to include just a definition of some jargon, where the substantive issues surrounding that piece of jargon are discussed elsewhere. For example, I might define a priori in the a priori article, and then put pointers to a priori truth and a priori knowledge articles, where the real content about the topic will exist. Second, pointer pages. The other sort of acceptable "definition-only" article would be a pointer page, consisting of a list of several divergent senses of a word, each defined on the page, and each definition followed by a pointer to an article where the topic, in that sense, is discussed in more depth. On such a pointer page, by the way, there is rarely any good reason to list senses of the word or phrase if those senses are not the subjects of encyclopedia articles.
Optional: leave something undone, or even ask a question (often, italicized) in the article for others to answer.
It's very reasonable to think that it is important to the psychology of Wikipedia that we all understand ourselves as not writing articles that simply identify people, events, and concepts, in a very basic way, but that actually give details, "empirical facts," content. That tiny extra bit of content is very important, psychologically speaking, because every time it is written, or read by another contributor, it makes it clear that the project is indeed eventually going to be about going deep into all these subjects.

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