This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Many parts of wikipedia use a reverse chronological order: the most recent edits at the top of the page, and the older contributions at the bottom. Would it be an idea to use that on WP:WSS/P as well? After all, the top of the page is the first thing of the page that many people see. I believe it would stimulate outsider input if they could immediately see where to propose a new stub type. I also don't think it's very convenient to have to scroll through the entire page, or to have to sift through the content box, for ongoing discussions. Many of the discussions in the top of the page (the proposals from October, November and early December have already come to an end, so I don't see why they should clutter up the page this way. What pushed me to come to this proposal/suggestion is the recent reformatting of Proposed mergers, which has gone from an alphabetical order to a reverse chronological order. Aecis Mr. Mojo risin' 00:45, 12 January 2006 (UTC) PS. I'm prepared to do the reformatting myself when I'm less busy in real life, but I feel that we might need to go through a request for page protection during the course of the reformatting
say youve got the following to archive:
Dec 1 Dec 2 Dec 3
with the archives the same way round as the project page youd simply copy and paste the lot in one go. but if the project page is
Dec 3 Dec 2 Dec 1
and all the sections on those days are also newest at the top, youd have to reorder everything as you went when archiving. seems fiddlier to me. BL kiss the lizard 01:19, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
Strongly support reverse order, and at Discoveries. Much more user-friendly.-- Mais oui! 01:07, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
So there is a consensus for reformatting the page? If so, I will request page protection for the duration of the reformatting. Aecis Mr. Mojo risin' 12:51, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
I just saw the following quote on the internet
[1]:
<jkl> "This pornography-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it."
<jkl> That's the worst pickup line ever.
-:)
Aecis Mr. Mojo risin' 10:56, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
See Talk:David Hassinger. Two issues:
1. If anyone knows a better stub flag for this than bio-stub, obviously that would be good. But engineer-stub isn't right IMO, and I can't find a better one.
2. Is there a call for an unsortable category? One for articles that would otherwise go into categories like people stubs, as they are in a subject area for which there are too few stubs to justify a stub category? Depending on the answer to (1) above, this may be a case in point. If it stays in people stubs it will probably waste a lot of people's time. Andrewa 21:18, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
How about {{ music-bio-stub}}?-- Carabinieri 21:20, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
I believe that the current tag ({{ music-producer-stub}}) is very appropriate, but otherwise Carabinieri's suggestion would be good. And what about {{ US-bio-stub}}? Aecis Mr. Mojo risin' 21:26, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
Agree, we've solved question 1 well IMO. I'll leave question 2 as a suggestion. It's just a matter of whether this might, overall, reduce the average amount of time that needs to be spent on a stub before it becomes a proper article, which is after all the goal! The members of the project (which IMO does sterling service just BTW) are in a much better position to comment on this than I am. Andrewa 21:40, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
As per the above discussion, I've gone ahead and reversed the order of this page. I'll hold off on reversing WP:WSS/D until there's more feedback on the new order. Mairi 00:57, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
I hope I'm not spamming the page excessively with these; if it's any comfort, there's only about another five of those that meet the basic criteria I've been using, and that look basically sensible. After that, I'll upload the remainder of the raw data, if people want to check if some of the overlaps of size < 60 are 'under-tagged', which is I suspect extremely likely. Alai 03:17, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
I'm done with the trawl through the over-threshold double-stubbings of oversized categories: the complete list is here, if anyone wants to review the data, or propose any of the ones that I skipped. I've also just compiled a secondary list, also where one potential parent is oversized, but where the overlap is <60 (but >=30). In many of these cases I'd imagine that there's "under-double-stubbing" and some of these will actually be viable, should anyone wish to propose these semi-speculatively, or do a more accurate count. Alai 03:23, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
I'll grant that we're often behind the game on archiving this page, but I'd prefer if we could avoid archiving proposals that aren't "finalised": in particular, proposals that are "approved", but not yet created. Unless we flag those in some other fashion. Otherwise, chances are the creation queue will get even more ad hoc than it is at present... Alai 14:30, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
In that it is frequently easier to guess a related category name or syntax (exact name and capitalization, etc.) it would be most helpful if category pages were annoted with a uplink to the parent. It would certainly help those of us most occupied adding expansion materials to correctly concurrently add the correct categories.
I suspect it will greatly help all our tasking! 'Can't believe this hasn't been thought of before!' See 'egg on face' comment below!
Fra
nkB
Best regards, Fra nkB 20:13, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Since I do a lot of those side article fix ups, I admit to bias... but the idea has merit. Even if it's nothing to do with sorting stubs per se. Those checking in here must be traversing a fair number of articles, so there's a thought with merit, do as you will with it! Best regards, Fra nkB 03:58, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
I apparently never saved out on the edit I was recommending. It should have looked like This example or when polished for presentation and organization, the current: Category:History of Canada . Apologies Fra nkB 20:59, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
People of WSS, come help sort Category:University stubs. There are too many of them and I have finals coming up. Thanks. - CrazyRussian talk/ contribs/ email 22:31, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
A thought I just had while recording a vote: should we have some sort of speedy creation policy for obvious splits of oversized categories? -- CComMack 11:30, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Grutness. The current policy of just turning a blind eye, when it's obvious that there won't be any problems, is ok.-- Carabinieri TTaallkk 12:48, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
One of my activities in WP:WSS is adding stub categories to Category:Stub categories. In many cases, this is a pretty obvious and straight-forward activity. I'm not sure about one kind of stub categories though. Should categories like Category:People stubs by nationality and Category:People stubs by occupation be moved to Category:Stub categories, or should they be kept as they are? Aecis Apple knocker Flophouse 22:02, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
At some time recently, we seem to have lost this section from the bottom of WP:WSS/P.... which makes this an ideal time to suggest a very slight reorganisation of the page. If you're like me, you often fail to notice any changes to the "other discussion" section, and having one part of the page "new at top" and the other "new at bottom" has always seemed a little clumsy to me. I'd like to propose that we change the system slightly so that, while proposed new stubs are still at WP:WSS/P, any other stub-related discussions come here, to the talk page. I think they'll be far more easily seen here and be far more likely to get an active discussion. Any thoughts? Grutness... wha? 09:52, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
We currently have a fair amount of double stubbing with science fiction and fantasy related stubs. Over in the main categories they've adopted the use of the superset speculative fiction to desl with essentially the same problem. I propose that we do the same here in stub sorting, however thereis one big issue to consider. What do we do with the abbreviation "sf" in our stub template names?
Given that option 3 suffers from both disadvantages, I think we can discount that. From the standpoint of naming, if we were starting from scratch. option 1 is the best choice, but the inertia of people who think sf = science fiction would be a problem, but not a large one since scifi is a subset of speculative fiction. Right now I favor option 1, but could be persuaded otherwise. In any case, I'm in no rush here, but would like to get some sort of consensus. Caerwine Caerwhine 07:27, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm also in favour of keeping science fiction at sf and not sci-fi. — Nightst a llion (?) 09:49, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
The other option is to combine the lot into "SF". Within the science-fiction community, SF is seen as the standard abbreviation, whether you mean "science fiction", "speculative fiction", "science fantasy" or any of the like.-- BlueSquadron Raven 22:37, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
AKA, multi-stub templates revisited. Anyone not completely burnt out on this idea, please have a quick look at User:Alai/A Hypothetical Stub, to see if this might be a possible basis on which to tweak the appearance of multi-stubbed articles, via a meta-template. (Before anyone goes sub-orbital, note that none of this is "bleeding into" the template, category or article spaces at present, this is purely a testbed (hence the uncategorised pseudo-templates, awkward inclusion syntax, etc).) To summarise: this works by testing for "short" versions of each of the included stub templates, and if they all exist, including them in a single horizontal row, following the generic portion of the stub canned text, on a separate line. If any are missing, it instead just includes and stacks up the "normal" stubs. What's key here is that: it uses existing template names, not "freeform" parameters, or category names, hence no extra stuff to remember; and it fails in a graceful way if there's no "short" version of the associated template (as is bound to happen, both initially, and as new templates are introduced), and gives the usual template redlink if it doesn't exist at all, rather than a category redlink. Beyond that, I'm not wedded to any of the details, and if people can improve the appearance or whatever, please fire away (just not with live ammo, in my direction). It would need to be tweaked or duplicated to deal with treble- and quadruple-stubbing, but that's straightforward. Let me admit up front that this doesn't address the possible massive inclusion issue, which I'd basically suggest we deal with by tweaking the code in advance, discussing it with the devs, and then super-duper-protecting the thing. OTOH, even if this gets some sort of support, it won't instantly appear on 60,000 articles, so it's not going to be an immediate crisis in that regard. Alai 05:18, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
{{multistub|bio|UK}}
to double-stub as both a UK-stub, and a bio-stub. (I know, silly example, as obviously there's a UK-bio-stub.)
Alai 06:11, 27 June 2006 (UTC)I realize this month may be an extreme example (mea maxima culpa), but I wonder if the monthly sections aren't getting to be so far as to be a hazard to navigation. Would sub-headers by date (or even by week?) be to anyone's liking? Or indeed, to anyone's intense disliking? Alai 17:33, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Pegship ( talk • contribs)
The "old business" marker is a good start, but I'm wondering if we need something more to help go through the old Proposals. I put together a few dummy templates and an example of how they would be used. My idea uses 3 different templates: one for "create", one for "do not create", and one for "other/no consensus". In theory, I'd like for there to be only one template that would change the color based on what parameter you put in, but my wikicoding skills are severly lacking. The idea was that the templates would be color-coded so that you could easily go through the proposals page and help create things that were approved, but no one got around to actually creating. Also, if you had proposed something, you would know the result of the debate quickly.
This was just my first crack at it, so feel free to offer suggestions, changes, comments, whatever. This may not be a great solution, but it was just an idea.
Example page ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 19:34, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
I copied all the discussions to the July archive page. I've left copies of those still needing creation on the Proposals page, so if you create one, please feel free to delete the discussion. Cheers, ♥ Her Pegship♥ 19:27, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
Hello, excuse me butting in on this page. The philosophers would like a way of searching philosophy articles that need expert attention. So how do I query for articles that are both in the 'Philosophy' category, and 'Need expert attention'? If there is a way of doing this, of course. Dbuckner 15:41, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
I've been tagging and moving sections to the archives, as it becomes clear what the consensus is (if any) and once the template has been created (if approved). Some of these discussions, though, I find a little hard to follow (mommyhood has limited my ability to follow a train of thought very far...), so if someone has a better feel for whether something is "create", "nocreate" or whatever, please feel free to tag it as such and I'll do the heavy lifting (i.e. moving sections to the appropriate archive page). Cheers, ♥ Her Pegship♥ 04:15, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm not sure what the outcome was of the proposal to delegate responsibility to the above-named WikiProject, buf if the proposal was rejected could you please mark that page as rejected or historical? I have some doubts about the organisation at the moment and would counsel against accepting the proposal at this stage. -- kingboyk 14:03, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
I've added a "New poposals" header to the page, as is done on other process pages like CFD - it seems to make the process work a little more smoothly there, so why not here, too? Grutness... wha? 00:50, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
I've been itching to move the August old business off this page. Shall I shift concluded discussions over to Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals/Archive/August 2006 completed, even if the approved stub types haven't been created? They can still be found on the archive summary page. Or shall I let August linger on Proposals until the page length begins to annoy? No rush, I'm sure, just a yen for tidiness on my part. ♥ Her Pegship♥ 18:25, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
Hi my suggestion is that right after it says "Good number means about 60 articles or more, or 30 or more if associated with a WikiProject, though this figure may vary from case to case." you include the link to the "stub sensor". This page does not mention "stub sensor". If I had only known about stub sensor 2 months ago... Goldenrowley 21:31, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I just ran across a good example of waht appears to be a common problem with stubs. Category:African writer stubs uses the plural form of African, which I think is appropriate. However, the template to place articles within: {{Africa-writer-stub}} uses the singular "Africa". Is this appropriate? Could the template name be changed? Should the template name be changed? It can be difficult finding some of these stub categories, and it seems to me that a lack of standardisation in this respect is one reason why.-- Ohms law 09:19, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Please forgive the newcomer for asking the silly question, but i'm not about to go digging through month's or even years worth of discussion to try to decipher the answer to this. The simple question that I have to ask is, why not simply allow the creation of a foo-stub subcategory for each and every existing category? It seems logical to me that each actual category would have a coresponding foo-stub subcategory to it. I don't see what's so special about a stub that differentiates them from the normal wiki categorisation policies/procedures. It appears to me that we're duplicating and creating extra work for ourselves, when it would be easy enough to create a foo-stub subcategory to any category that has use of a stub tag. -- Ohms law 17:39, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
This hits directly home to my primary point, I think. Currently, we are expending time and effort in categorizing articles within the stub system regardless. If this time and effort were to ultimately lead to categorising the article withing wikipedia's normal category system, wouldn't that be more helpfull than the current methodology? Regardless, I'm off to read the Archives... :) -- Ohms law 19:40, 14 November 2006 (UTC)Secondly, even if there were, it'd quickly lead to an exercise in "guess the right category to find a feasible number of stubs in"1
OK, I guess that i'm restarting this discussion. The point that I am trying to make here is that I beleave that we should be attempting to match the existing permanent category structure, as closely as is reasonable within the current guidelines for creating stubs categories. As an example of how we are not currently doing this, I'd like to point out this example:
Category:Texas contains within it a sub category Category:Texas stubs. This is good (the stubs cat matches the perm cat).
Category:Dallas stubs and now Category:Fort Worth stubs have been created as cub categories of Category:Texas stubs. This is a mistake, in my opinion. For one thing, having stubs categories that are children of other stubs categories creates an atmosphere of permanence (in categorising the articles) that I don't beleave we should be encouraging. Category:Cities in Texas has been established as a permanent category, and therefore is where stub articles about a city in texas should be. Therefore, there should be a Category:Cities in Texas stubs category/template. If such a category becomes too large for some reason, we could then create (for example) a Category:Dallas, Texas stubs category and sort out those articles tht need to be in it.
Simply put, I don't understand why we have our own category structures (stubs categories that are sub-categories of other stubs categories). Any stub category should, in my mind, be a dead end and have as it's parent the most relevent permanent category that otherwise exists.-- Ohms law 11:52, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
Simply put, I don't understand why we have our own category structures (stubs categories that are sub-categories of other stubs categories). Any stub category should, in my mind, be a dead end and have as it's parent the most relevent permanent category that otherwise exists.--Ohms law 11:52, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
-- Ohms law 12:30, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
I'll quote from the virtual classroom article I wrote on stubs: Why are the stub categories different from other categories? To put it simply, the main categories are designed to make it easier for readers. A reader looking for an article on a particular subject can go straight to a category on that subject and find the specific article they are looking for. In contrast, stub categories are aimed at making it easier for editors. If an editor knows about a particular subject, they are likely to want to be able to pick and choose between a number of articles they can work on. For that reason, your are unlikely to find stub categories with only one or two articles, like you can with permanent categories. The Stub sorting WikiProject does its best to ensure that stub categories are of a reasonable size - not so big as to overwhelm an editor, but not so small as to make it necessary for an editor to look through lots of categories (ideally, we use about 50-500 articles as an optimal size for stub categories). For that reason, stub categories aren't always identical to main categories, although we aim to make the discrepancy between the two as small as is practical.
To put it in terms relating to the above example, neither Dallas-stub not ForthWorth-stub is in itself likely to be particularly large. The same group of editors is likely to know about both of these groups of stubs. As such, it makes more sense for the stubs to be in one place, to reduce the effort of editors having to look in more than one category. Yes, there is a permanent "Cities in Texas" category, but it is populated either by subcategories or individual articles, each related to a specific city (which makes sense, when you think about it). Given the overall size of the Texas geography stubs category, splitting the stub category in this way would be counterproductive - especially given that for many places, one subtype of geo-stub by feature is a huge proportion of geo-stubs (in many cases, the parent cat would be reduced by some 75% or more, which makes it a complete waste of time - why go from having one large category to having another large category?). Again, to take an extreme example, consider {{ Seychelles-geo-stub}}. There is a subcategory of Category:Geography of Seychelles for Category:Islands of Seychelles. But what good would a {{ Seychelles-island-stub}} do? It would simply take over 80% of the items currently marked with Seychelles-geo-stub - hardly aiding stub sorting.
There is also an additional problem, in that a large number of editors object to the over-stubbing of articles - if an article has more than about four stub types it is usually seen as being a bad thing. In contrast, to a large extent, the more permcats an article has, the better. So the more accurately an article can be stubbed with as few stub types as possible, the better. This comes back to the idea I mentioned above about how stub categories and permanent categories are essentially used for different purposes by different groups of people. It also leads to the situation which is currently being discussed on other topics at WP:WSS/P, that adding one stub type is often done at the expense of adding another, rather than bing done as a complement to it.
A further problem yet occurs with the sheer size of the stub category tree if this was to be implemented. We currently have 1500-2000 stub categories, which is large but not totally unmanageable. The number of pernmcats is considerably larger. Monitoring of them alone would become a full-time task, let alone actually implementing them. To give one example, the size of WP:SFD is already big enough (in fact, there have been complaints before about its size). compare it to the size of WP:CFD.
Another problem if the category tree is to be used as an absolute model is the one I already mentioned when this was being discussed at WP:WSS/P - many permcats are significantly below a viable threshold for stub sorting and cannot but remain so. Many would indeed be permanently empty.
The stub category tree is different to the permcat tree, but there are very good reasons for it to be so. It is, however, parallel to a large extent, using the parts which are most appropriate to the task of stub sorting, but ignoring the ones which would actually make the task harder. Consider it a compromise that works better than either a fully identical system or a completely separate system would do. Grutness... wha? 22:16, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
I Just saw/found this, which seems to be somewhat topical: [2]-- Ohms law 18:55, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
This is similar discussion as well: [3]-- Ohms law 19:46, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
[4] is not entirely helpfull in answering this question, from what I've read. I have my own opinion, but I'd like it to be verified by my peers. Simply stated, is the act of stub-sorting by itself (editing an article simply to change the -stub template) a minor edit? -- Ohms law 19:52, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Hi folks - could someone look at October and tag the discussions, if they are indeed concluded? Sometimes I have a hard time working out what was said, done, or decided...thanks!! [Mommy Brain] Her Pegship 00:36, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
How much of a rule is the 60-article threshold for new stub types? I'd like to create a {{ Cameroon-bio-stub}}, but by my count, there are only 54 articles that qualify. There is, however, a {{ Cameroon-footy-bio-stub}} that would theoretically be a subcategory of the one I'd like to create. There'd also be a lot more stubby articles in Category:Cameroonian people, but, well, I don't like writing stub-length articles. So, is 54 articles okay in some cases? Should I wait a bit before proposing the new stub type? — BrianSmithson 08:54, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
I realize this will do little (if anything) to satisfy the "just do it" school of thought that reckons the whole proposal system is completely intolerable, but I've been thinking that we might somewhat reduce the "waiting time" on this page. It's rare that a discussion continues full-tilt for a whole week, and even when it does there's nothing to stop "closure" being delayed in such cases until it's clear there's consensus (or a clear lack of same). I'd like to suggest five days, on the basis of this being the timescale of AfD, and having the advantage of being the interval from the end of one weekend, to the start of the next, if people are inclined to do a chunk of stub-sorting and analysis at same. Lest anyone be caught out by such a breakneck pace (sic), I'd also like to suggest we initiate a practice of placing notification of proposed "splits" on the category talk page of the parent (a single subst'd template would suffice for this, parameterised by section header). (I think this latter is a good idea in any event, regardless of the waiting period, I just mention it here by-the-by.) Alai 15:52, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
In the spirit of Wikipedia:Be Bold, Wikipedia:Avoid instruction creep and WP:NOT#Wikipedia_is_not_a_bureaucracy I think it needs to be made clear somewhere that this is not a required procedure. If I know a stub-template is a good idea and I know it doesn't badly overlap another template, then why wait a week? --- J.S ( T/ C) 20:46, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
No, this is a required procedure. We have it posted everywhere that you need to proposal a stub before you create it. Also, we have recently shortened the proposal time to only 5 days. I don't see how this is instruction creep. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 20:55, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Okay, fine. I'm sorry for making it sound like this was an absolutely required procedure. It's just that we try to put guidelines on stub templates and categories so that they are organized in one place and follow standard naming procedures. When things get created out of process, it makes a lot of trouble for everyone. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 21:33, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Consider the following points:
Grutness... wha? 23:12, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
It's not a policy, but Wikipedia:Stub is a guideline which states that the formal process should be followed. (Admittedly, the page could be toned down somewhat.) I'm sure that if you're an experienced editor and find a legitimate reason to create a stub template (instead of mere vanity, e.g.: "There's a cool template for project X so we / I / this page should have one also!"), you can endure the few days. Efforts to enhance a category of stub-sized articles last much longer. By the way, there are many other WikiProjects that deal with the maintenance of Wikipedia itself. If this WikiProject comes across as an exclusive club (a bit surprising considering the amount of participants), it might be appropriate to stress that anyone is welcome. Wipe 03:56, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Category:Probability stubs should perhaps be merged in Category:Statistics stubs. -- MarSch 17:23, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps. There is actually a permcat called Category:Probability and statistics. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 17:35, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
I just noticed that Alai had suggested back in October to create subcategories for two of the Swedish regions.
Nobody commented on this suggestion and I missed it myself. The problem is that a few of the Swedish permcats are oddly named. Almost all of them use the Swedish name, but "Western Götaland" differs for one reason or another and its "twin", Category:Östergötland (Eastern G.) is named "correctly". Do we really have to go through the entire process again just to correct the second category name to Category:Västergötland geography stubs? The corresponding article is called Västergötland, btw. Valentinian (talk) / (contribs) 02:04, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
Fairly recently the {{ California-geo-stub}} and {{ California-south-geo-stub}} had all of the California counties added as daughter stubs (e.g. {{ LosAngelesCountyCA-geo-stub}}), but currently the county stubs still point to the two main California-geo-stub categories (e.g. Category:Southern California geography stubs). There are now over 80 LA County geo stubs, and I've probably only found about half of them to convert from SoCal geo stubs to LA County geo stubs. Since the county stubs have already been proposed, approved, and created, do I still need to propose its accompanying category, or can I go ahead and create Category:Los Angeles County geography stubs and then modify {{ LosAngelesCountyCA-geo-stub}} without having to get additional approvals? Blank Verse 03:26, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Many parts of wikipedia use a reverse chronological order: the most recent edits at the top of the page, and the older contributions at the bottom. Would it be an idea to use that on WP:WSS/P as well? After all, the top of the page is the first thing of the page that many people see. I believe it would stimulate outsider input if they could immediately see where to propose a new stub type. I also don't think it's very convenient to have to scroll through the entire page, or to have to sift through the content box, for ongoing discussions. Many of the discussions in the top of the page (the proposals from October, November and early December have already come to an end, so I don't see why they should clutter up the page this way. What pushed me to come to this proposal/suggestion is the recent reformatting of Proposed mergers, which has gone from an alphabetical order to a reverse chronological order. Aecis Mr. Mojo risin' 00:45, 12 January 2006 (UTC) PS. I'm prepared to do the reformatting myself when I'm less busy in real life, but I feel that we might need to go through a request for page protection during the course of the reformatting
say youve got the following to archive:
Dec 1 Dec 2 Dec 3
with the archives the same way round as the project page youd simply copy and paste the lot in one go. but if the project page is
Dec 3 Dec 2 Dec 1
and all the sections on those days are also newest at the top, youd have to reorder everything as you went when archiving. seems fiddlier to me. BL kiss the lizard 01:19, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
Strongly support reverse order, and at Discoveries. Much more user-friendly.-- Mais oui! 01:07, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
So there is a consensus for reformatting the page? If so, I will request page protection for the duration of the reformatting. Aecis Mr. Mojo risin' 12:51, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
I just saw the following quote on the internet
[1]:
<jkl> "This pornography-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it."
<jkl> That's the worst pickup line ever.
-:)
Aecis Mr. Mojo risin' 10:56, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
See Talk:David Hassinger. Two issues:
1. If anyone knows a better stub flag for this than bio-stub, obviously that would be good. But engineer-stub isn't right IMO, and I can't find a better one.
2. Is there a call for an unsortable category? One for articles that would otherwise go into categories like people stubs, as they are in a subject area for which there are too few stubs to justify a stub category? Depending on the answer to (1) above, this may be a case in point. If it stays in people stubs it will probably waste a lot of people's time. Andrewa 21:18, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
How about {{ music-bio-stub}}?-- Carabinieri 21:20, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
I believe that the current tag ({{ music-producer-stub}}) is very appropriate, but otherwise Carabinieri's suggestion would be good. And what about {{ US-bio-stub}}? Aecis Mr. Mojo risin' 21:26, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
Agree, we've solved question 1 well IMO. I'll leave question 2 as a suggestion. It's just a matter of whether this might, overall, reduce the average amount of time that needs to be spent on a stub before it becomes a proper article, which is after all the goal! The members of the project (which IMO does sterling service just BTW) are in a much better position to comment on this than I am. Andrewa 21:40, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
As per the above discussion, I've gone ahead and reversed the order of this page. I'll hold off on reversing WP:WSS/D until there's more feedback on the new order. Mairi 00:57, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
I hope I'm not spamming the page excessively with these; if it's any comfort, there's only about another five of those that meet the basic criteria I've been using, and that look basically sensible. After that, I'll upload the remainder of the raw data, if people want to check if some of the overlaps of size < 60 are 'under-tagged', which is I suspect extremely likely. Alai 03:17, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
I'm done with the trawl through the over-threshold double-stubbings of oversized categories: the complete list is here, if anyone wants to review the data, or propose any of the ones that I skipped. I've also just compiled a secondary list, also where one potential parent is oversized, but where the overlap is <60 (but >=30). In many of these cases I'd imagine that there's "under-double-stubbing" and some of these will actually be viable, should anyone wish to propose these semi-speculatively, or do a more accurate count. Alai 03:23, 12 February 2006 (UTC)
I'll grant that we're often behind the game on archiving this page, but I'd prefer if we could avoid archiving proposals that aren't "finalised": in particular, proposals that are "approved", but not yet created. Unless we flag those in some other fashion. Otherwise, chances are the creation queue will get even more ad hoc than it is at present... Alai 14:30, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
In that it is frequently easier to guess a related category name or syntax (exact name and capitalization, etc.) it would be most helpful if category pages were annoted with a uplink to the parent. It would certainly help those of us most occupied adding expansion materials to correctly concurrently add the correct categories.
I suspect it will greatly help all our tasking! 'Can't believe this hasn't been thought of before!' See 'egg on face' comment below!
Fra
nkB
Best regards, Fra nkB 20:13, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Since I do a lot of those side article fix ups, I admit to bias... but the idea has merit. Even if it's nothing to do with sorting stubs per se. Those checking in here must be traversing a fair number of articles, so there's a thought with merit, do as you will with it! Best regards, Fra nkB 03:58, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
I apparently never saved out on the edit I was recommending. It should have looked like This example or when polished for presentation and organization, the current: Category:History of Canada . Apologies Fra nkB 20:59, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
People of WSS, come help sort Category:University stubs. There are too many of them and I have finals coming up. Thanks. - CrazyRussian talk/ contribs/ email 22:31, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
A thought I just had while recording a vote: should we have some sort of speedy creation policy for obvious splits of oversized categories? -- CComMack 11:30, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Grutness. The current policy of just turning a blind eye, when it's obvious that there won't be any problems, is ok.-- Carabinieri TTaallkk 12:48, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
One of my activities in WP:WSS is adding stub categories to Category:Stub categories. In many cases, this is a pretty obvious and straight-forward activity. I'm not sure about one kind of stub categories though. Should categories like Category:People stubs by nationality and Category:People stubs by occupation be moved to Category:Stub categories, or should they be kept as they are? Aecis Apple knocker Flophouse 22:02, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
At some time recently, we seem to have lost this section from the bottom of WP:WSS/P.... which makes this an ideal time to suggest a very slight reorganisation of the page. If you're like me, you often fail to notice any changes to the "other discussion" section, and having one part of the page "new at top" and the other "new at bottom" has always seemed a little clumsy to me. I'd like to propose that we change the system slightly so that, while proposed new stubs are still at WP:WSS/P, any other stub-related discussions come here, to the talk page. I think they'll be far more easily seen here and be far more likely to get an active discussion. Any thoughts? Grutness... wha? 09:52, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
We currently have a fair amount of double stubbing with science fiction and fantasy related stubs. Over in the main categories they've adopted the use of the superset speculative fiction to desl with essentially the same problem. I propose that we do the same here in stub sorting, however thereis one big issue to consider. What do we do with the abbreviation "sf" in our stub template names?
Given that option 3 suffers from both disadvantages, I think we can discount that. From the standpoint of naming, if we were starting from scratch. option 1 is the best choice, but the inertia of people who think sf = science fiction would be a problem, but not a large one since scifi is a subset of speculative fiction. Right now I favor option 1, but could be persuaded otherwise. In any case, I'm in no rush here, but would like to get some sort of consensus. Caerwine Caerwhine 07:27, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
I'm also in favour of keeping science fiction at sf and not sci-fi. — Nightst a llion (?) 09:49, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
The other option is to combine the lot into "SF". Within the science-fiction community, SF is seen as the standard abbreviation, whether you mean "science fiction", "speculative fiction", "science fantasy" or any of the like.-- BlueSquadron Raven 22:37, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
AKA, multi-stub templates revisited. Anyone not completely burnt out on this idea, please have a quick look at User:Alai/A Hypothetical Stub, to see if this might be a possible basis on which to tweak the appearance of multi-stubbed articles, via a meta-template. (Before anyone goes sub-orbital, note that none of this is "bleeding into" the template, category or article spaces at present, this is purely a testbed (hence the uncategorised pseudo-templates, awkward inclusion syntax, etc).) To summarise: this works by testing for "short" versions of each of the included stub templates, and if they all exist, including them in a single horizontal row, following the generic portion of the stub canned text, on a separate line. If any are missing, it instead just includes and stacks up the "normal" stubs. What's key here is that: it uses existing template names, not "freeform" parameters, or category names, hence no extra stuff to remember; and it fails in a graceful way if there's no "short" version of the associated template (as is bound to happen, both initially, and as new templates are introduced), and gives the usual template redlink if it doesn't exist at all, rather than a category redlink. Beyond that, I'm not wedded to any of the details, and if people can improve the appearance or whatever, please fire away (just not with live ammo, in my direction). It would need to be tweaked or duplicated to deal with treble- and quadruple-stubbing, but that's straightforward. Let me admit up front that this doesn't address the possible massive inclusion issue, which I'd basically suggest we deal with by tweaking the code in advance, discussing it with the devs, and then super-duper-protecting the thing. OTOH, even if this gets some sort of support, it won't instantly appear on 60,000 articles, so it's not going to be an immediate crisis in that regard. Alai 05:18, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
{{multistub|bio|UK}}
to double-stub as both a UK-stub, and a bio-stub. (I know, silly example, as obviously there's a UK-bio-stub.)
Alai 06:11, 27 June 2006 (UTC)I realize this month may be an extreme example (mea maxima culpa), but I wonder if the monthly sections aren't getting to be so far as to be a hazard to navigation. Would sub-headers by date (or even by week?) be to anyone's liking? Or indeed, to anyone's intense disliking? Alai 17:33, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Pegship ( talk • contribs)
The "old business" marker is a good start, but I'm wondering if we need something more to help go through the old Proposals. I put together a few dummy templates and an example of how they would be used. My idea uses 3 different templates: one for "create", one for "do not create", and one for "other/no consensus". In theory, I'd like for there to be only one template that would change the color based on what parameter you put in, but my wikicoding skills are severly lacking. The idea was that the templates would be color-coded so that you could easily go through the proposals page and help create things that were approved, but no one got around to actually creating. Also, if you had proposed something, you would know the result of the debate quickly.
This was just my first crack at it, so feel free to offer suggestions, changes, comments, whatever. This may not be a great solution, but it was just an idea.
Example page ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 19:34, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
I copied all the discussions to the July archive page. I've left copies of those still needing creation on the Proposals page, so if you create one, please feel free to delete the discussion. Cheers, ♥ Her Pegship♥ 19:27, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
Hello, excuse me butting in on this page. The philosophers would like a way of searching philosophy articles that need expert attention. So how do I query for articles that are both in the 'Philosophy' category, and 'Need expert attention'? If there is a way of doing this, of course. Dbuckner 15:41, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
I've been tagging and moving sections to the archives, as it becomes clear what the consensus is (if any) and once the template has been created (if approved). Some of these discussions, though, I find a little hard to follow (mommyhood has limited my ability to follow a train of thought very far...), so if someone has a better feel for whether something is "create", "nocreate" or whatever, please feel free to tag it as such and I'll do the heavy lifting (i.e. moving sections to the appropriate archive page). Cheers, ♥ Her Pegship♥ 04:15, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
I'm not sure what the outcome was of the proposal to delegate responsibility to the above-named WikiProject, buf if the proposal was rejected could you please mark that page as rejected or historical? I have some doubts about the organisation at the moment and would counsel against accepting the proposal at this stage. -- kingboyk 14:03, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
I've added a "New poposals" header to the page, as is done on other process pages like CFD - it seems to make the process work a little more smoothly there, so why not here, too? Grutness... wha? 00:50, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
I've been itching to move the August old business off this page. Shall I shift concluded discussions over to Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals/Archive/August 2006 completed, even if the approved stub types haven't been created? They can still be found on the archive summary page. Or shall I let August linger on Proposals until the page length begins to annoy? No rush, I'm sure, just a yen for tidiness on my part. ♥ Her Pegship♥ 18:25, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
Hi my suggestion is that right after it says "Good number means about 60 articles or more, or 30 or more if associated with a WikiProject, though this figure may vary from case to case." you include the link to the "stub sensor". This page does not mention "stub sensor". If I had only known about stub sensor 2 months ago... Goldenrowley 21:31, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
I just ran across a good example of waht appears to be a common problem with stubs. Category:African writer stubs uses the plural form of African, which I think is appropriate. However, the template to place articles within: {{Africa-writer-stub}} uses the singular "Africa". Is this appropriate? Could the template name be changed? Should the template name be changed? It can be difficult finding some of these stub categories, and it seems to me that a lack of standardisation in this respect is one reason why.-- Ohms law 09:19, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Please forgive the newcomer for asking the silly question, but i'm not about to go digging through month's or even years worth of discussion to try to decipher the answer to this. The simple question that I have to ask is, why not simply allow the creation of a foo-stub subcategory for each and every existing category? It seems logical to me that each actual category would have a coresponding foo-stub subcategory to it. I don't see what's so special about a stub that differentiates them from the normal wiki categorisation policies/procedures. It appears to me that we're duplicating and creating extra work for ourselves, when it would be easy enough to create a foo-stub subcategory to any category that has use of a stub tag. -- Ohms law 17:39, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
This hits directly home to my primary point, I think. Currently, we are expending time and effort in categorizing articles within the stub system regardless. If this time and effort were to ultimately lead to categorising the article withing wikipedia's normal category system, wouldn't that be more helpfull than the current methodology? Regardless, I'm off to read the Archives... :) -- Ohms law 19:40, 14 November 2006 (UTC)Secondly, even if there were, it'd quickly lead to an exercise in "guess the right category to find a feasible number of stubs in"1
OK, I guess that i'm restarting this discussion. The point that I am trying to make here is that I beleave that we should be attempting to match the existing permanent category structure, as closely as is reasonable within the current guidelines for creating stubs categories. As an example of how we are not currently doing this, I'd like to point out this example:
Category:Texas contains within it a sub category Category:Texas stubs. This is good (the stubs cat matches the perm cat).
Category:Dallas stubs and now Category:Fort Worth stubs have been created as cub categories of Category:Texas stubs. This is a mistake, in my opinion. For one thing, having stubs categories that are children of other stubs categories creates an atmosphere of permanence (in categorising the articles) that I don't beleave we should be encouraging. Category:Cities in Texas has been established as a permanent category, and therefore is where stub articles about a city in texas should be. Therefore, there should be a Category:Cities in Texas stubs category/template. If such a category becomes too large for some reason, we could then create (for example) a Category:Dallas, Texas stubs category and sort out those articles tht need to be in it.
Simply put, I don't understand why we have our own category structures (stubs categories that are sub-categories of other stubs categories). Any stub category should, in my mind, be a dead end and have as it's parent the most relevent permanent category that otherwise exists.-- Ohms law 11:52, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
Simply put, I don't understand why we have our own category structures (stubs categories that are sub-categories of other stubs categories). Any stub category should, in my mind, be a dead end and have as it's parent the most relevent permanent category that otherwise exists.--Ohms law 11:52, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
-- Ohms law 12:30, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
I'll quote from the virtual classroom article I wrote on stubs: Why are the stub categories different from other categories? To put it simply, the main categories are designed to make it easier for readers. A reader looking for an article on a particular subject can go straight to a category on that subject and find the specific article they are looking for. In contrast, stub categories are aimed at making it easier for editors. If an editor knows about a particular subject, they are likely to want to be able to pick and choose between a number of articles they can work on. For that reason, your are unlikely to find stub categories with only one or two articles, like you can with permanent categories. The Stub sorting WikiProject does its best to ensure that stub categories are of a reasonable size - not so big as to overwhelm an editor, but not so small as to make it necessary for an editor to look through lots of categories (ideally, we use about 50-500 articles as an optimal size for stub categories). For that reason, stub categories aren't always identical to main categories, although we aim to make the discrepancy between the two as small as is practical.
To put it in terms relating to the above example, neither Dallas-stub not ForthWorth-stub is in itself likely to be particularly large. The same group of editors is likely to know about both of these groups of stubs. As such, it makes more sense for the stubs to be in one place, to reduce the effort of editors having to look in more than one category. Yes, there is a permanent "Cities in Texas" category, but it is populated either by subcategories or individual articles, each related to a specific city (which makes sense, when you think about it). Given the overall size of the Texas geography stubs category, splitting the stub category in this way would be counterproductive - especially given that for many places, one subtype of geo-stub by feature is a huge proportion of geo-stubs (in many cases, the parent cat would be reduced by some 75% or more, which makes it a complete waste of time - why go from having one large category to having another large category?). Again, to take an extreme example, consider {{ Seychelles-geo-stub}}. There is a subcategory of Category:Geography of Seychelles for Category:Islands of Seychelles. But what good would a {{ Seychelles-island-stub}} do? It would simply take over 80% of the items currently marked with Seychelles-geo-stub - hardly aiding stub sorting.
There is also an additional problem, in that a large number of editors object to the over-stubbing of articles - if an article has more than about four stub types it is usually seen as being a bad thing. In contrast, to a large extent, the more permcats an article has, the better. So the more accurately an article can be stubbed with as few stub types as possible, the better. This comes back to the idea I mentioned above about how stub categories and permanent categories are essentially used for different purposes by different groups of people. It also leads to the situation which is currently being discussed on other topics at WP:WSS/P, that adding one stub type is often done at the expense of adding another, rather than bing done as a complement to it.
A further problem yet occurs with the sheer size of the stub category tree if this was to be implemented. We currently have 1500-2000 stub categories, which is large but not totally unmanageable. The number of pernmcats is considerably larger. Monitoring of them alone would become a full-time task, let alone actually implementing them. To give one example, the size of WP:SFD is already big enough (in fact, there have been complaints before about its size). compare it to the size of WP:CFD.
Another problem if the category tree is to be used as an absolute model is the one I already mentioned when this was being discussed at WP:WSS/P - many permcats are significantly below a viable threshold for stub sorting and cannot but remain so. Many would indeed be permanently empty.
The stub category tree is different to the permcat tree, but there are very good reasons for it to be so. It is, however, parallel to a large extent, using the parts which are most appropriate to the task of stub sorting, but ignoring the ones which would actually make the task harder. Consider it a compromise that works better than either a fully identical system or a completely separate system would do. Grutness... wha? 22:16, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
I Just saw/found this, which seems to be somewhat topical: [2]-- Ohms law 18:55, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
This is similar discussion as well: [3]-- Ohms law 19:46, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
[4] is not entirely helpfull in answering this question, from what I've read. I have my own opinion, but I'd like it to be verified by my peers. Simply stated, is the act of stub-sorting by itself (editing an article simply to change the -stub template) a minor edit? -- Ohms law 19:52, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
Hi folks - could someone look at October and tag the discussions, if they are indeed concluded? Sometimes I have a hard time working out what was said, done, or decided...thanks!! [Mommy Brain] Her Pegship 00:36, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
How much of a rule is the 60-article threshold for new stub types? I'd like to create a {{ Cameroon-bio-stub}}, but by my count, there are only 54 articles that qualify. There is, however, a {{ Cameroon-footy-bio-stub}} that would theoretically be a subcategory of the one I'd like to create. There'd also be a lot more stubby articles in Category:Cameroonian people, but, well, I don't like writing stub-length articles. So, is 54 articles okay in some cases? Should I wait a bit before proposing the new stub type? — BrianSmithson 08:54, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
I realize this will do little (if anything) to satisfy the "just do it" school of thought that reckons the whole proposal system is completely intolerable, but I've been thinking that we might somewhat reduce the "waiting time" on this page. It's rare that a discussion continues full-tilt for a whole week, and even when it does there's nothing to stop "closure" being delayed in such cases until it's clear there's consensus (or a clear lack of same). I'd like to suggest five days, on the basis of this being the timescale of AfD, and having the advantage of being the interval from the end of one weekend, to the start of the next, if people are inclined to do a chunk of stub-sorting and analysis at same. Lest anyone be caught out by such a breakneck pace (sic), I'd also like to suggest we initiate a practice of placing notification of proposed "splits" on the category talk page of the parent (a single subst'd template would suffice for this, parameterised by section header). (I think this latter is a good idea in any event, regardless of the waiting period, I just mention it here by-the-by.) Alai 15:52, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
In the spirit of Wikipedia:Be Bold, Wikipedia:Avoid instruction creep and WP:NOT#Wikipedia_is_not_a_bureaucracy I think it needs to be made clear somewhere that this is not a required procedure. If I know a stub-template is a good idea and I know it doesn't badly overlap another template, then why wait a week? --- J.S ( T/ C) 20:46, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
No, this is a required procedure. We have it posted everywhere that you need to proposal a stub before you create it. Also, we have recently shortened the proposal time to only 5 days. I don't see how this is instruction creep. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 20:55, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Okay, fine. I'm sorry for making it sound like this was an absolutely required procedure. It's just that we try to put guidelines on stub templates and categories so that they are organized in one place and follow standard naming procedures. When things get created out of process, it makes a lot of trouble for everyone. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 21:33, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Consider the following points:
Grutness... wha? 23:12, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
It's not a policy, but Wikipedia:Stub is a guideline which states that the formal process should be followed. (Admittedly, the page could be toned down somewhat.) I'm sure that if you're an experienced editor and find a legitimate reason to create a stub template (instead of mere vanity, e.g.: "There's a cool template for project X so we / I / this page should have one also!"), you can endure the few days. Efforts to enhance a category of stub-sized articles last much longer. By the way, there are many other WikiProjects that deal with the maintenance of Wikipedia itself. If this WikiProject comes across as an exclusive club (a bit surprising considering the amount of participants), it might be appropriate to stress that anyone is welcome. Wipe 03:56, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Category:Probability stubs should perhaps be merged in Category:Statistics stubs. -- MarSch 17:23, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Perhaps. There is actually a permcat called Category:Probability and statistics. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 17:35, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
I just noticed that Alai had suggested back in October to create subcategories for two of the Swedish regions.
Nobody commented on this suggestion and I missed it myself. The problem is that a few of the Swedish permcats are oddly named. Almost all of them use the Swedish name, but "Western Götaland" differs for one reason or another and its "twin", Category:Östergötland (Eastern G.) is named "correctly". Do we really have to go through the entire process again just to correct the second category name to Category:Västergötland geography stubs? The corresponding article is called Västergötland, btw. Valentinian (talk) / (contribs) 02:04, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
Fairly recently the {{ California-geo-stub}} and {{ California-south-geo-stub}} had all of the California counties added as daughter stubs (e.g. {{ LosAngelesCountyCA-geo-stub}}), but currently the county stubs still point to the two main California-geo-stub categories (e.g. Category:Southern California geography stubs). There are now over 80 LA County geo stubs, and I've probably only found about half of them to convert from SoCal geo stubs to LA County geo stubs. Since the county stubs have already been proposed, approved, and created, do I still need to propose its accompanying category, or can I go ahead and create Category:Los Angeles County geography stubs and then modify {{ LosAngelesCountyCA-geo-stub}} without having to get additional approvals? Blank Verse 03:26, 30 December 2006 (UTC)