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Forced sort works with categories but not stubs?

I know with categories you can force an article to show up under the right letter by adding a parameter to the category code -- for example [[Category:American horror writers|King, Stephen]] to make it show up under "K" rather than "S". I tried this with a stub (specifically with horror-film-stub on The Aftermath (film)) and it had no effect. Is there a way to do this? --Bookgrrl 22:07, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

This has been discussed many times before, including earlier on this page (I would also suggest going through the archives of this page as well). It's a lot of extra work, not everyone does it, it messes up bot renames, the list goes on. In general, we pretty much avoid doing that. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 23:12, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes - change the coding on all 3500 stub templates, and probably grind Wikipedia's servers to a halt while you're doing it. Which is why it's never been done. Sorry, but until there's an easier way to do this, sort is by title pure and simple. It isn't perfect by a long way, but it saves both coders and probably techs several weeks'-worth of full-time work. Grutness...wha? 23:17, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Since articles are supposed to eventually "grow out" of the stub size, there's little point in investing a lot of energy into making sure the stub categories sort correctly, is there? The same effort could be put into writing a longer article... -- nae'blis 23:20, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
well, it would be nice - it'd make it easier for editors to find the stubs. But it is a lot of work for not much reward, it's true. Grutness...wha? 06:03, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Since it has been discussed many times before, and consensus suggests that for stubs it should be in "article" name order, why not make this an explicit part of the stub sorting instructions/guidelines? I came here today for exacty this information (my preference being LN,FN, for reasons already enumerated) and it was not an easy route to enlightenment. Thanks to those who asked, and those who answered (with their reasons). I will now go forth to help order the wiki--and, as always, hoping not to screw it up myself! RCEberwein | Talk 02:11, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I've tried again to raise this issue at the stub guideline page; please comment there, if you have any views on this. Alai 02:44, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Odd problem win NZ-geo-stubs

This one's an odd one - I'm not sure what's causing it... I'm busily replacing NZ-geo-stub with the region-specific templates. I started by going through Category:New Zealand geography stubs, but then realised that, since a lot of the regional templates still feed back into there, it would be easier to work from the "whatlinkshere" of {{NZ-geo-stub}}. The odd thing is that a lot of the articles in that whatlinkshere list, ones transcluded with the template, don't show up in the category. I've no idea why not, but the two attached thumbnails (fuzzy though they are - sorry!) should show you what I mean. Where in the cat is Alfred River, Allen River, Boulder River, Blind River or Aorere River? Since these will soon have different templates, the problem will disappear from these particular articles - but if it's a widespread problem elsewhere it's quite concerning. Grutness...wha? 01:46, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

No idea what's happend but using a null-edit on them worked. Interesting. Valentinian (talk) / (contribs) 02:04, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
Did you make sure to scroll through the entire "what links here" list? I've found that the "what links here" is NOT in alphabetical order. In fact, it's not in any order that I can discern. It's hard to tell from the screen shots if that is the case, but I just thought I'd throw that out there as a possibility. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 02:43, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, "What links here" is in the order in which the article was created, with the oldest articles being listed first. Caerwine Caer’s whines 00:23, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, that seems like a strange way to sort things, but oh well. I think this got figured out. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 14:52, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
That's not the point. There are things in the Whatlinkshere which aren't in the category - and the category is in alphabetical order. None of those I mentioned above was in the category. In fact, I'd guesstimate that 1/4 of those in the whatlinkshere list weren't in the cat. Grutness...wha? 05:05, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
In the past, changes in a template weren't implemented until the article using the template was edited. The updating can be accomplished on an individual article basis by those null edits mentioned by Valentinian. Not very long ago, something changed so that this is no longer necessary, but it takes mayb a couple of hours for the updating to happen.
Whether that is done by the wiki software, or some bot, or whatever, I don't know. But I suspet that what happened in this case is that the last edit to the template is moving it back into the Template namespace after somebody had moved it out. So the software/bot/whatever didn't recognize it as being a change to a template (it started outside of template namespace), so the automatic refreshing wasn't done. I just did a null edit to the template itself; don't know if that will be sufficient. But I strongly suspect that if you do a nearly null edit to the template, something like adding a space, which will show up in the edit history unlike a completely null edit, then come back in a few hours and your articles will be listed in the category. Gene Nygaard 20:34, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
I just checked the template's log. Somebody did indeed make an unauthorized move of this template back in September, moving it out of template namespace. This was reverted a few days later. So the lesson seems to be that if ever a template is moved, we have to edit the result as well. Valentinian (talk) / (contribs) 21:11, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
Thaks for that - it's moot as far as this category's concerned anyway - as i said, I'm going through them all subcategorising them - I was just worried it might be happening elsewhere, too. You're right, it could well be the recent attempted move of the template that caused the trouble. Grutness...wha? 21:46, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Multistub template

Hi all. A couple of days ago I speedied a template called stub-group, which was basically a multistub template of the form {{stub-group|x-stub|y-stub}}, which, when added to an article, would give it both x-stub and y-stub. I speedied it as basically a re-creation of a type of template we've had here in the past which has been deleted after a lot of frowning. Anyhow, I got into an interesting discussion with its creator (User:Jerzy) which quickly became too technical for me, but which might be of interest to anyone who knows a little about how markup and the like work - sounds like Jerzy would be interested in talking about its possibilities, if any, with someone who knows more about the technical side of things than I do. Feel free to read what was written on my talk page (linked above) and contact Jerzy about it if you've got any thoughts! Grutness...wha? 08:30, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Location of stub in article

Where should the stub be located within the article? I've been looking to see if there is policy on this and can find none. Personally, I place them below the cateogires with 2 blank lines. They are usually above the other languages but not always. Your thoughts?--Thomas.macmillan 19:51, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

A merry Christmas/Season's greetings to all Stub sorters!

The heading says it all, really - compliments of the season to you all - may it be a happy one for you! Grutness...wha? 02:08, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

You too! Just H 04:26, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Badness?

Just stumbled across {{actor stub}} and it seemed fishy. Thought I'd let yall know. jengod 01:24, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

mmm. whoops! Looks like I accidentally pressed the delete button. Grutness...wha? 02:47, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

{{HeBible-stub}} revived

awfully named. Ideas on renaming? {{tanakh-stub}}? {{hebrew-bible-stub}}? {{Judaism-bible-stub}}? - crz crztalk 17:25, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I've wondered that for a while. Problem is that it's the Hebrew Bible but also the Christian Old Testament, so any name used needs to reflect both. Which, come to think of it, the current one doesn't. Perhaps Tanakh-stub with redirect at OldTestament-stub? Grutness...wha? 21:53, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Tanakh is not quite the same thing as the old testament BTW... see {{Books of the Old Testament}} for the full list of differences - crz crztalk 22:38, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
True - I should have said almost the same. The point is, though, that the template is used to some extent for items mentioned in both the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament. I don't see any way the two could be split from the point of view of stub-sorting. Having both names (perhaps Hebrew-Bible-stub rather than Tanakh-stub) would solve any potential overlap/exclusion. BTW, I don't know how big this category currently is, but if it were to be split, then Torah/Pentateuch would make a likely subcategory. Grutness...wha? 23:13, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
388. Most of these are useless importations from Easton's PD bible dictionary (which is awful) and will eventually be deleted. - crz crztalk 23:19, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, any of the imperfect alternatives is better than the status quo. What shall I ask for at SFD, people? - crz crztalk 02:52, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Given the various category names, I'd suggest Tanakh-stub, with redirects to taste... just not from the current name, please! Alai 06:58, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Continued at SFD. Fayenatic london 08:18, 17 January 2007 (UTC)


Please sort a few stubs today

Over the last few days, it seems that every time I check Category:Stubs it has more articles in it. If everyone reading this would sort, say, five of the stub articles today, we could probably clear the category and thus be able to keep it to a manageable size for a while. (The category is probably never going to be permanently cleared, but at least we could get it temporarily cleared rather than continuously expanding.) --Metropolitan90 17:15, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Actually, a lot of us do clear a few stubs per day, it's just that (a) there are less of us around because of the holidays and (b) sometimes a huge batch of stubs comes in at once. As to it "never being empty", it is more often empty than not, so I don't think there's too much concern. Grutness...wha? 23:25, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
It appears that the number of unsorted stubs dropped by about half today. So I do appreciate the work done by the person or persons who made the effort. --Metropolitan90 06:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
And the rest of them have now been cleared out, too. Again, thanks to everyone who worked on sorting stubs over the last couple of days. --Metropolitan90 04:33, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
I am currently working on album stubs, sorting thereof (in conjunction with WP:ALBUM). I have done A – P in the last couple of days and hope to have the rest done soon. Bubba hotep 17:18, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Rename Template:Astro stub to Template:Astronomy stub

The subject pretty much says it all. Could Template:Astro stub be renamed to Template:Astronomy stub? It's a more logical name for it. Thanks. Mike Peel 10:45, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

You should take it to WP:SFD for renaming. --TheParanoidOne 11:33, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

DEFAULTSORT

We keep having requests to allow sorted stubs via pipes. e.g. {{stub|Last Name, First Name}}. Now it looks like we'll be getting them like it or not. So new it isn't even in the documentation yet, the software has a new variable as of last December 29: DEFAULTSORT. (link) {{DEFAULTSORT:Last Name, First Name}} works on all categories in an article, including those supplied via templates, that don't specify a sort key of their own. I don't think we have any reason to get rid of this behavior, but we could by adding: |{{FULLPAGENAME}} to the category added by every stub template. Caerwine Caer’s whines 19:05, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I mentioned this on Wikipedia talk:Stub a few days ago, and included a link to Signpost article about the new feature. I see no reason not to embrace the use of the DEFAULTSORT magic word as standard procedure, and to regard any biographical article lacking it in much the same way as we regard an article with no permcats. —CComMack (t–c) 20:26, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
I see no problem with this, and it's a cleaner version of something I suggested it'd be possible to hack in parser functions. Mind you, it'll probably motivate further instistence that we add sort key parameters, for when the default behaviour for Cedric Middlename Smith and Cecil Double Barrelled, and more complex cases besides, Goes Wrong(TM). Alai 06:24, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Of course, given a bit longer, and I do see various problems with this... I've commented somewhat at Wikipedia talk:Categorization#DEFAULTSORT (though perhaps here is as good or better for the aspects of this that are particular to stub types). Alai 16:08, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

And I've also mentioned this at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography#DEFAULTSORT and bio-stubs. Alai 02:30, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Are all Stubs worthy of encyclopedic entry?

I was browsing some of the stub categories and found Bus Stubs [[1]] . What I do not understand is why some of these exsist. Their imformational value is limited and also dynamic, as bus routes tend to change. At any given time half of these references might be invalid. I've read the guidlines for stubs but I am still unsure as to whether a one sentence article defining a Bus route and schedule in a rural Austrailian town that may or may not still be active is deserving of an entry in an Encyclopedia. It might belong in an Almanac for the region its relevent to perhaps? Finfyd 08:57, 12 January 2007 (UTC)Finfyd

We just sorts 'em here. If you feel any of them are unworthy of being on WP, take them to afd. Bus routes are right on the borderline - routes for large cities often survive afd, but ones for small semi-rural areas don't = you're right that they're not really WP material. Most articles in Category:Bus stubs should, with any luck, be makes of bus and bus companies anyway, rather than individual routes! Grutness...wha? 09:06, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
I started out looking up something, which lead me to a stub that had a tag for sorting or deleting or something, which lead me to the project for sorting stubs which lead me all over trying to understand what stubs were. Kind of an intersting adventure. I appreciate the clarification. Finfyd 09:09, 12 January 2007 (UTC)Finfyd

Why did this happen?

I created "Category:Biochemist stubs" as a sub-category of "Biologist stubs", but it is listed under "μ" on the third page of Biologist stubs instead of under "B" on the first page. Is there something in the syntax that made this happen? Scolaire 15:31, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Heh. You added Biologist stubs into the category template as the permanent category - Category:Biochemists should have gone there. That automatically put the stub cat under µ at the end of the categories (which is where stub cats usually go in their parent permcats). Fixed. Grutness...wha? 22:38, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Gotcha. Thanks for that, Grutness. Scolaire 19:04, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Bot-populating {{stub}}?

No-one faint, but there's been a db dump this weekend. I'm currently crunching some data relating to uncategorised articles. I'm not sure I'll get any hard data before I flake out, but I very much get the impression that there's a very large number, and doubtless many of them will be very short. (Most of them will be articles created in the last two months, since the last db dump, plus any that have 'lost' categories in that time.) I plan to tag these this {{uncat}}, but would WSS favour very short uncategorised articles being instead tagged with {{stubs}}{{stub}}? (I'd prefer to avoid tagging them with both at once.) If so, where would people favour putting the cutoff? At 250b? 500b? 1K? I should be able to report on the likely scale of this... well, stop press, right about now: over 20916 uncatted articles total; 2408 <= 250b; 5606 <= 500b; 10141 <= 1000b. Alai 05:25, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

{{stub}}, not {{stubs}}, Alai - otherwise they'd be a LOT longer than 1k! :) More seriously, that's a huge number f stubs. It's probably worth putting stub on anything under (gulp) 500b, then all hands to the pump. Grutness...wha? 05:38, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Well, if we're being nano-picky (howdya like that hyphenate?), that would only include the length of the wikitext, which is what I'm measuring in the numbers quoted above, by 9 bytes... Of course, many of them will be mergeable, speediable/prod-able/otherwise deletable, disambigs not tagged as such, etc, etc. I'll wait at least a day before I start this (partly as the 'bot is tagging some of the longer ones right now), so if anyone else has a number in mind... Alai 06:07, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
I've filed this as a bot task request for approval, here: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Alaibot 3. Feel free to comment if you have thoughts on the wisdom or otherwise of such a course. Alai 02:16, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
Ahh, job security. Stub away. Her Pegship (tis herself) 15:06, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
No comments on this at all so far at the request page, and no approval either. (Just a meta-comment on the talk page as to why some get approved in six minutes, and others don't get approved (or discussed?) in six days.) If anyone feels strongly about this either way, I'd encourage them to comment, especially as WSS is very much the "affected project" by this activity. Alai 03:50, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
Looks like it was just approved. All hands on deck!! Her Pegship (tis herself) 21:05, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
Populating the 'trial' batch now. Alai 01:36, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
Eek, Stubs 'r' us over there. Maybe the but still receives a few articles periodically text on the project page should be changed if this bot is going to be active? --Scott 14:59, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
By all means, if you wish. I was just coming to say, that for those of you that feel that 100 articles is a "backlog", there 250+ at present, likely to grow if run another batch tonight. I think the "dead-end pages" people are tagging a fair number of these too. (I'm entirely flexible on this, though ideally I'd like to keep ahead of the updates to special:uncategorizedpages. (A fuzzy criteria, since that seems to have become somewhat irregular again.) I appeal to everyone, not to stay their hand if something looks like a deletion candidate (by whichever method), redirect-fodder, etc; and also to try to be as specific as possible in retagging things. (If we just move a shedload into Category:People stubs, it just increases the "backlog" there, and the amounnt of double-handling involved (not to say treble-, quadruple-, etc).) Alai 15:29, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

State of play: 4685 articles in Category:Stubs. I should also note that there's currently a bot approval request for doing this on a thrice-daily basis, from special:newpages (as well as "wikify" and "uncategorised"). Alai 13:32, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Comment - many of these recently added "stubs" aren't stubs at all. A lot of them (going from what i've seen so far, about 20%) are mislabelled dab pages. I like the idea of doing this from newpages, though - I was thinking along similar lines myself, although it will mean a huge number of new stubs all the time. Grutness...wha? 23:50, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
I could label them as "very short uncategorised mainspace pages", if that would make people feel any better... I'm not sure how worthwhile it'd be try to automatically distinguish between malformed dabs and quarter-written articles, but if anyone has any rules-of-thumb in mind that they'd be willing to stand over when the false-positive flak starts... I have mixed feelings about the newpages-based approach. Ultimately it should have much the same effect as doing it in batches, but it'd mean that it happens on articles within hours of their creation, as opposed to after they've already "slipped through the net" of people cruising the new articles manually. Which might be a good thing, or else it might just boost the size of the cleanup queues, I'm not clear which. Alai 02:33, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

And here's a list of deletion templates for those of us new to the db world...Her Pegship (tis herself) 00:59, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Category:Lunar crater stubs: what to do with?

On the one hand, the moon-stubs are down from oversized... to undersized (well, semi-good, at least). On the down side, in the process the Moon-crater-stubs are now at 1085. I've asked the people at the Moon wikiproject (see here), and they seem to think that these are "short but essentially complete articles", and it does seem that the bulk of these were tagged (originally as moon-stub) by one person (MER-C, whom you might recall from such incidents as having created a shedload of "planetary" stubs, most of which didn't make much sense at all). The wikiproject, and in particular the original creator of these articles, also didn't seem at all keen on the idea of merging these articles, and nor were they gone on the idea of further sorting. While personally I'm not crazy about "untagged permastubs", I'm not sure whether there's anything much else to be done in this case. Anyone have any bright ideas? Alai 12:11, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Aside from putting a needs photo tag on them and checking to make certain that the person(s) they were named after have Category:People with craters of the Moon named after them, I can't really see what might be added on most of these. Perhaps checking to make certain that any moon probes that landed in them link to and are included in the article, but that's more something for a WikiProject to worry about. Since there really isn't anything to add for most of these, then despite their size, they aren't stubs. However, if you can talk the Moon people into doing the task of deciding which ones aren't stubs, that would be good. Caerwine Caer’s whines 22:01, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

a little history

I just expanded Wikipedia:History of Wikipedian processes and people#Stubs. There were a lot of things in pre-stub development I wasn't aware of until I went digging. WSS folk may find it interesting, and have something to add. :) - BanyanTree 00:58, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

What is this mania about categorizing everything over and over and over?

An article already tells us about its subject, like the one about George W. Bush that says he's from Texas, that he's a US President, that he was in the oil business that he was in the National Guard, etc. But that isn't enough, apparently, because then we have categories to tell us all over again that Bush is A Person From Texas, A Person Who's A President, A Person In The Oil Business, and A Person Who Was In The National Guard. And we litter his article with category-related grids with the names of Every Person From Texas, Every US President, Every Person In The Oil Business, and Every Person Who Has Been In The National Guard, because heaven forbid someone who wants any of those lists should have to expend effort clicking a link reading "president" or "National Guard" in the body of the article to get these lists from the article in which they logically belong. And in case all of that isn't enough, when an article is a stub, we have to say it's a Texan-US-President-National-Guard-Oilman stub because if we just said it's a stub, the reader would have no way whatsoever of knowing what the article is about or what it means for it to be a stub. Good grief. —Largo Plazo 04:51, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

  • No, because if "just said it's a stub", Category:Stubs would be 600,000 articles long. I suggest you redirect complaints about categorisation in general elsewhere, as they're thoroughly off-topic here (if not to say, borderline uncivil). Alai 16:45, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
    • I would have responded by asking (a) why stubs need to be a category at all and (b) why it makes a difference if a category has as many entries as it logically contains. I would also have asked why the Talk page for a project is not the place for a discussion the purpose of the project. However, I just noticed, and do wish I had noticed yesterday, the section in this article called "Why is stub sorting important?" and now I do see the rationale. —Largo Plazo 19:58, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Well, look at it this way. You're an editor. You're interested i, say, archaeology. You're looking for archaeology articles to expand. Which is easier, to look in a category containing 500 archaeology stubs and nothing else, or to croll through 3,000 category pages, each containing 200 article titles, to find the one in 1200 articles on archaeology there? Or, for that matter, to hunt at random because these articles aren't listed in any category? There are also technical reasons why really big categories aren't very good for Wikipedia - such as causing its servers to crash. Grutness...wha? 04:25, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
The categories are ok, but the notices "this article is a xxx-related stub" are simply stupid -- nobody needs them: readers already know they can edit wikipedia and it's not hard to see it's a short article. The sorting just gives something to do to some people who otherwise have too much free time on their hands. It would be more useful if those people would try to fix the actual articles instead of cluttering the page histories with their changes of stub categories.
Some call the Germans "Nazis" for their hard-line policies (including the one of stub notices (Kurz-Artikels), which were removed), but that was a smart decision, as they focus on the actual encyclopedic content instead on mindless categorization of stubs... bogdan 12:01, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

FWIW, most of the peoplle involved in stub-sorting actually do a lot of work on expanding articles as well. And creating new articles, too. As for the message on the template, it is aimed at those editors who wouldn't otherwise consider editing the article (a lot of WP readers come here to do just that - read information, not edit). Those that do come here primarily to edit need some way of finding out where there articles are that need editing - hence the sorting of stubs. You can't have it both ways. It's a bit like expecting a sport season to go ahead without coaches, umpires, or physiotherapists, or a movie to be made without electricians and caterers. Someone has to do the behind the scenes work to keep things running smoothly. And, just for the record, most stub sorters do an enormous amount of work on article creation expansion as well, as well as on loads of other features of WP. I know that I've managed to help get four articles to FA standard, including being the primary editor on one front-page article, as well as adding literally hundreds of maps, illustrations and photographs to articles. I doubt I'm alone among stub sorters with doing a lot of work beyond the stub arena. Grutness...wha? 12:25, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

"The sorting just gives something to do to some people who otherwise have too much free time on their hands." hahahahahahahahaha! if only!!!!!!! (sorry, got hysterical there for a moment) "It would be more useful if those people would try to fix the actual articles instead of cluttering the page histories with their changes of stub categories." Well, gosh, since so many stub articles have such scant sources of information, and since I'm totally not interested in, say, archaeology, that's kind of problematic. As a Wikignome, the best I can do is copyedit, tidy up, tag, and encourage others with more time on their hands than I to expand it. And I'm darn good at it, too. Every book in print has an editor, who didn't write the book but who led it through the production process, so please don't sneer at the Little People. </rant> Her Pegship (tis herself) 15:24, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

New guy sorting tool stubs

Hi, there. I've decided to go through the tool stubs (I guess I'm sorting...) since I know a fair bit about that stuff. I've gotten up to the "E"s. I'm finding alot that don't meet the description of stubs (and thus removing the tag). Is that normal? Pjbflynn 04:23, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

It's usual to find at least some that aren't stubs when doing sorting. Caerwine Caer’s whines 05:15, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

WP:WSS/NG overhaul proposal (and first re-draft!)

Took me about 7-8 hours, but I think it sings. Did not change a single substantive thing about it either, as far as how it works, what is recommends, what procedures are, etc., etc. It's just a massive cleanup. Please see first wikilink ("The story") for proposal on how to proceed, in stages, designed to prevent the process from descending into argument and editwarring. Goal: Have WSS/NG become a formal Wikipedia Proposal and then Guideline. At a guess this is stage 1 of 4. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 11:03, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

PS: Yes, this has something to do with being tired of arguing with Alai and Grutness in SfD and WSS/P, whatever the outcome of the argument, and instead wanting to work on something positive and cooperative in WSS, which is why I joined in the first place. :-) Toodles. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 11:09, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Well done! A lot of work, but a much needed overhaul - that's the problem with these sorts of pages being built up gradually over time palimpsestuously (if there is such a word). One suggestions - since, as you say, 'recommendations" is more neutral term than "guidelines", but perhaps that term is a little too weak? Since the page is listed as part of Wikipedia's naming conventions, perhaps referring to them as stub naming conventions would be better - recommendations suggests that other names are allowable, yet we're doing what we can to stop that happening since it adds to confusion in the system. These naming styles are the conventionally used names for stub templates and categories, and they have been formed over a long period of time and considerable amounts of discussion, so perhaps it is a better name. The page may also need a new title, whatever is decided on that. Grutness...wha? 23:08, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. Replied for real at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Naming guidelines/Redraft1 so the doc itself has a record of talk about it. :-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 01:29, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Redrafting, stage 2

At Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Naming guidelines/Redraft2 I have listed a bunch of unlikely-to-be-controversial improvements for the NG document. Most of these were already clearly identified in Redraft1 as HTML comments, while a few come from Redraft 1 discussion. The HTML comments just mentioned are still (as of this writing) present in Redraft2, to indicate likely insertion points. Depending on when you read this, some of them may have alread been replaced with new text, or removed because controversial. I would propose that any item on the list that anyone feels is controversial in any way should be struck out and saved for Redraft Phase 3, the dealing with controversial stuff. Several of them may require a consensus discussion to determine what exactly they should say/advise. Let's do it! — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 04:52, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Top 30 most used stubs

Hello everybody,

I'm working on a script like TWINKLE's Speedy for Stub storting.

Obviously, I cannot include every stub type, they're too many: I need the most common 30, or the list will be too long.

Can somebody provide me that?

Thanks,

Happy Editing by Snowolf(talk)CONCOI on 16:25, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

  • The To do page has a section that lists the most populated stub types as of the last time a bot is run that checks the stub categories for size. (The bot is run about once a month.) At present there are 28 stub categories listed as having more than 1000 articles and another 28 that have 801 to 1000 articles. That list changes considerably from update to update as stub types that have a lot of article in them attract the most attention of stub sorters and are generally the target of splits into smaller, more manageable stub types. Caerwine Caer’s whines 17:25, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Can I ask you to clarify what precisely you're looking for, and what exactly you're going to do with it? (Your user page discussing this has a redlink to the .js, so it's not really clear.) If this is for script-based stub-tagging, it'd be of limited use, since 30 stub tags would give fairly poor coverage, and result in pile-ups in the liks of Category:People stubs, which really need to be much more "deeply" sorted. (For actual stub-sorting, this is even more the case.) Also, if this is the rationale, you don't want the 30 stub types that are currently the largest, since those are as much those that are the least sorted, as the most heavily used. (I could perform a somewhat deeper analysis of usage of whole hierarchies, but as I say even that'd be of limited value.) However, there's the seeds of something that could be very, very useful here: can't the whole stub type list be coded, but hierarchically? Secondly, could this be used to refine an existing stub type, using the existing tag as the "root" of the sub-tree to be 'popped up', to be chosen from? I realize this is likely to be a tall order in coding terms, but it'd be something extremely interesting to work towards. Alai 02:52, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
Alai, you're totally right about everything. I'll try do do such a thing, but don't expect to hear about it soon, it's not an easy work and I'm quite busy. Anyway, I hope to manage to develop the tool you're searching for. Happy Editing by Snowolf(talk)CONCOI on 15:24, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Arbitration enforcement filing relating in part to stub types

As it relates in part to non-consensus scope changes to, and indeed edit-warring on, certain stub types, participants may wish to see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Arbitration enforcement#User:Huaiwei and User:Instantnood. Alai 05:29, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Stubsort template

I've revised Template:stubsort to be more helpful to editors. Please comment on Template talk:stubsort. Thanks! — jmorgan (talk) 21:03, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

A catch-all stub category

Recently when having my bot run through Category:Living people I was asked if I could do the stubs seperately so they could be auto-assessed as stub class. The difficulty, of course, is that a multitude of different stub templates might be in use, so building a cross-reference list wouldn't be the easiest task.

This led me to thinking how useful to automated processes an additional catch all category for stubs would be, a Category:Living people of stubs if you will. It would of course require an alteration to every stub template. Thoughts?

In the meantime, it looks like Category:Stub categories is catch all with subcategories. Is every stub (templated as such) guaranteed to be in a subcategory of this cat? --kingboyk 16:52, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Guaranteed? Nothing is ever guaranteed on Wikipedia, but it should be, yes. It's one of the categories added by the standard {{Stub Category}} template that provides the default blurb text for stub categories, and any customized variants should include it as well. Caerwine Caer’s whines 21:23, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
Aha. That's as good as I could hope for then, and will suffice for now. Thanks for the helpful reply! --kingboyk 21:58, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
Yes, that's overwhelmingly likely, since almost all will be directly subcatted, as CW says, and of the few that miss that out for some reason, they'll typically at least be a sub-category of some other stub category that is. Any that aren't in that tree at all, there's something seriously wrong with (say if they've been vandalised, or are "freelance creations" no-one's taken any notice of yet). Also notice that every stub should have a template transclusion of a fairly predictable form (again with a small number of guideline-free-zone exceptions, certainly). But I'm not sure I follow the original comment. By catch-all do you mean some sort of Category:Living people stubs cat, as opposed to the existing Category:Stubs? Or do you mean a catch-all for the talk page categories, along the lines of Category:Stub-Class living people articles? Or am I getting completely confused, and you're actually talking about some sort of Category:All stubs cat? (Which would doubtless be something like 3/4 of a million articles these days, or something like just a binary order of magnitude difference from an Category:All articles.) What'd be the purpose of such a thing? Alai 06:59, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
It sounds like what he's doing is having a bot go through Category:Living people and adding {{WPBiography|living=yes}} to the talk pages of articles that don't already have {{WPBiography}} and that he's been asked to make that {{WPBiography|living=yes|class=stub|auto=yes}} for the articles that are marked as stubs. Caerwine Caer’s whines 07:49, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Sounds reasonable to me. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 10:01, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Right. --kingboyk 13:26, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
OK. So isn't it simplest just to pattern-match against (say) {{(|.*-)stub}} in the wikitext? Examining the categories would require looking separately at the html-as-served (though if you did, it'd be equally evident from the form of the category). Alai 18:37, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Not really, because AWB is list based, it's not a spider and it wouldn't even be loading the articles, just the talk pages. Of course I could write some plugin code to do this (load and examine article, then edit talk page), but to save reinventing the wheel I'd rather just cross-reference a list of biographies and a list of stubs and build myself a list of talk pages for the bot to process. --kingboyk 19:46, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Ah, I see. I thought that was exactly what your plugin did: obviously I had entirely the wrong end of the stick. I don't think reading the article immediately before editing the talk page would a "spider" make; if your bot is going to be doing hundreds of thousands of edits, a similar number of additional reads is almost a trifle (relatively speaking). (Doing it for every article in advance of doing any editing would obviously be a problem.) And if you're already working through a list of talk pages that you're going to edit anyway, then it's not any more additional reads than the same number of pages again. At any rate, you can get that list by traversing the stub category hierarchy, either via the live wiki, or from a db dump (rare creatures though those are these days; I could provide that, if you don't do the dumps thing). Making 3,000 template edits, adding a category to half our articles, and creating a thousand listings-page category in the process seems the painful way to do it (for both people and servers). Alai 01:01, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Categorising stub templates... again?

I've only just noticed this bot-approval request, to tag as "uncategorised" all templates not already categorised under category:wikipedia templates. (Implying, evidently, that they should all be so categorised.) Obviously, this would include almost all of the stub templates, as typically these are "only" categorised in the Category:Stub categories tree (except for those that have ignore WP:STUB, and 'opted-out' of that, too). This seems like deja vu from the last time there was a flurry of stub-template categorisation, though this basis may be somewhat different. Maybe we should just protect all 3000+ of 'em as HRTs. :/ Is this indeed overcategorisation for little purpose, or am I just being the semi-proverbial Rioting Conservative Tribesperson? Alai 02:35, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Can't speak as to this particular bot idea, but the general practice of categorizing stub templates in the stub articles category has always seemed silly to me, and appears to violate WP:SELF, anyway (articles of whatever type shouldn't be muxed in the same general-use category as WP-internal-use templates that refer to them categorically (not I say general-use category; I have no problem whatsoever with article's talk pages being WPP tagged so that they appear in Category:WikiProject Foo along with WikiProject Foo's templates and stuff; that's for internal WPP purposes. I'm just speaking here of the actual article categories. The templates simply should not be appearing in them, by my readng of WP:SELF). In my view, the stub templates should all be categorized in some sub-category of Category:Wikipedia templates. If the mentioned bot would do that, then it sounds good to me. However, I think it should be done not willynilly, but in some way that makes WSS happy, collectively. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 02:56, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Those are two entirely separate issues (though evidently you agree with gist of the bot proposal, which is to do the latter). But as to WP:SELF: first sentence, "within Wikipedia articles". WP:SELF#In the Template and Category namespaces: "Limited use of self-references are sometimes found in the Template namespace and the Category namespace, such as with disambiguation and stub notices." Stub categories are in effect unholy hybrids of article-space and maintenance cats, and "what should go in them" should be an entirely pragmatic consideration. Making it as clear as possible what the populating template is, and most especially, making the "population" of upmerged templates visible seems to me a much more important consideration than trying to regard them as pure article-space categories. And likewise, categorisation of stub tags under Category:Wikipedia templates serves... what purpose exactly? I'm as much in favour of manic taxonomy as the next person, but these changes each (and this combination, even more so) strike me as increasing categorisation-for-categorisation's-sake, and following the admittedly rather general trend towards unnecessarily "esoteric" (generally meaning, spammy and spaghetti-coded), at the expense of functionality. Alai 03:28, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
I guess I don't see what functionality is provided by mis-identifying stub templates as stub articles, is all. :-) It really does not compute for me that most templates on the system are categorized as part of the templates category hierarchy, but these aren't. How is it helpful to do it that way? I realize it's been done that way for a while, but I'm not sure that's a very compelling reason to keep doing it that way. I don't feel tremendously strongly about it, mind you. Just seems kind of strange. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 03:59, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
NB: Just to clarify, I think it would be remarkably silly, in the other direction, to start having categories like "Category:European biography stub templates" and so forth. One "Category:Stub templates" ought to be fine. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 04:01, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Where in the category name does it say "articles"? :) I personally don't see much point in the entire templates category hierarchy, at all. Are these cats really aids to navigation, or are they manifestations of an assumption that Everything Must Have a Category? On helpfulness: look for example at Category:Western United States radio station stubs. If the numerous upmerged templates were includeonly'd, it'd then be necessary to link them all from the category page. Extra spam, extra maintenance, extra inconsistency. Some category pages don't bother linking to their templates, including it in the category makes sure it's visible, somehow. (I think most of these have been fixed by now, but belt and braces doesn't hurt.) Equally, some template hide the category, and don't provide an explicit link to it instead, meaning you have to edit the template to find the cat. Hiding-and-linking is extra, IMO needless, template code complexity. (People then start feeling the urge to add mini-essays to the noincluded section, for information than would be better on the category page.) Incidentally, remarkably-silly-sub-categories is pretty much exactly what the previous scheme did (see my CFD links on the bot-prop page), though this plan seems to envisage something somewhat different. Of course, it's always possible that I'm suffering from a Grandpa Simpson-like mental spasm that 'you work hard to get things right, then what's "right" changes!' Alai 04:23, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Lacking a direct historical perspective on the question, I'm just going to remain neutral on it. Maybe I do think everything on the system should be in at least one category. I'm not sure. Hadn't ever really thought about it in those terms. I do find categorization of templates helpful, generally. If I see a template that almost suits the purpose I have in mind, I can often drop to the category level to find the one I really want. If they've been categorized. But I don't see that such reasoning is particularly strong when it comes to stub templates. <shrug> I'm firmly in the "eh... whatever y'all decide" camp on this one. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 05:30, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, they currently are in categories: the stub cats. But if one is the view they shouldn't be in those, and that should should be some (other) category, I can see how one might arrive at the conclusion that they ought to be in the 'templates' hierarchy, for the lack of anything better to do with 'em. So I suppose the two are linked in that way, under that assumption. But that seems a pretty abstract line of thinking to me. But I wouldn't want to argue on the basis of a 'historical perspective', which is a pretty sure-fire recipe for something that "feels right" to the people that "have always done it that way", but may be "actually right" on no actual logical basis. Alai 17:01, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
It makes more sense in my head to have them under the template category hierarchy or even under the Category:WikiProject Stub sorting space, and just article stubs in the stub categories. But of all the things I could care a lot about on Wikipedia, this really isn't likely to make the Top Ten. Heh. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 03:29, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Bot-populating: threshold OK?

How are people finding the current cut-off for tagging uncatted articles with {{stub}}? Anything being tagged that didn't look like a stub? Could the threshold stand to be raised somewhat? (It's currently 500 characters.) From either (or both) of the perspectives of the workload, and of the possibility of false positives... Alai 01:29, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Seems fine to me, but it's probably at the top end of what we can do and keep it under control. The only false positives I've really noticed are quite a few dab pages, but I can't see any way that a bot could distinguish them from stubs. Grutness...wha? 02:26, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
My guess is that it's at the low end of what's an "actual stub", though: of the uncategorised pages, the considerable majority of them are going to CAT:NOCAT, and perhaps something like a 1/4 to a 1/6 are going to Category:Stubs. If they get tagged as stubs later on in their life cycle, it's potentially introducing a huge lag into their life-cycle if they have to wait for two or three months to get "processed" at the former. (And come to that, only really by chance after that.) I wouldn't want to be seen as twisting anyone's arm, though... Alai 03:07, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Since the reservation about this concerned throughput rather than false positives, and since the throughput at the other likely destination is that much worse, I've gone ahead and upped the threshold to 600 bytes on the latest run from Special:Uncategorizedpages. If anyone finds this is starting to get a little too marginal, please let me know. Alai 16:50, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

On second thoughts... Would this be better expressed in terms of amount of text in the article, excluding wikimarkup? And/or as numbers of words/sentences? Alai 02:42, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

AWB counts the number of words (excluding some things like tables, I think). Anything over 500 words, and it flags it something like "long article marked with a stub tag". I'll take a look at it, and most often remove the stub tag. 500 words seems like a pretty reasonable threshold. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 14:36, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
That's working in the other direction, though: I'm looking for a threshold below which something is almost certainly a stub (unless it's a malformed redirect, disambig, etc), rather than a threshold above which it's unlikely to be. Is AWB offering to insert stub tags these days, and if so, what rule is it using for that? Alai 14:56, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I can see the subtle difference. And yes, AWB does autotag with {{stub}}, but I always turn that off. I'm not sure what its threshold is, and it's not in the user manual. Perhaps one of us (NOT IT! =P) asks on the AWB page. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 15:13, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
It's a pretty big difference: if I tagged every 499-word-or-less uncategorised article from the impending (menace?) db dump, there would be untold wailing and gnashing of teeth. And OK, I'll ask at the project page... Alai 15:25, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

How about: 100 words or less, after stripping out all markup, including the contents of infoboxes and other tables? Alai 04:05, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

I was doing some stuff in AWB today, and 100 words or less seems like a reasonable threshold. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 15:49, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

/ST size discussion

For those of you who are as hap-hazard in 'watching' project sub-pages as I am, let me draw your attention to /Stub types#Some more proposals to cut the page size. The latterly-suggested ideas would be quite far-reaching (and a real pain to later undo), so prior consensus would be preferable to posterior reversion. Alai 18:03, 11 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 21:44, 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)

Agree with all the above. Indeed, it's such a frequent topic that we should probably have a project page that explains some of the rationale for stub category organisation, in the form of an essay or a "FAQ" (or perhaps even in a guideline sub-page, if we ever get around to refactoring WP:STUB, which I've suggested elsewhere). Alai 02:39, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Concur, and would further suggest that it can probably be done pithily enough to simply be integrated as a ==Frequently asked questions== at WP:STUB. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 04:06, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
Definitely not, IMO. WP:STUB is already the very antithesis of pithy, and is regularly cited (in good faith or otherwise) as a reason why someone didn't propose a stub type or otherwise did something "bold" (generally meaning, wildly counter-consensus) with a stub type. Alai 05:08, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
Would having a Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Frequently asked questions be a reasnable compromise? There are questions which keep re-emerging (why do we have a threshold of 60 stubs, why do we use hyphens in some places and camelcaps in others in templates, why don't we use a single parametered stub template, that sort of thing). Having a set of canonical questions and answers (which could be found fairly easily by trawling the archives) would stop us from having to retype the same arguments each time. Grutness...wha? 23:43, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Right. I'm not trying to say anything political about WP:STUB at all; just saying there should be a FAQ somewhere. WP:STUB was just the locale that first popped into mind. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:59, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

So which is better?

Just a consensus-gauging question: Is it better to have the Marlon Manalo article stub-tagged with both {{Philippines-bio-stub}} and {{Asia-sport-bio-stub}}, or split up Category:Asian sportspeople stubs into more sub-categories such that we'd have a unified {{Philippines-sport-bio-stub}} (and others for Vietnam, etc.) but these stub categories would be underpopulated? I guess the question is really: Is it more important for the article to look better or for stub sorting categories to be well-populated? — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:52, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

We're now largely using a compromise measure that is better than either, by which the solution would be to create an upmerged philippines-sport-bio-stub feeding into both the phillipines-bio and asia-sport-bio categories until such time as there are enough stubs for a separate category. This compromise, which has picked up the name of "The Alai solution", is becoming more widespread and may in the long run be the solution to this sort of situation. Grutness...wha? 01:08, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
The "upmerged template" (double- or otherwise) option is often mooted when there's already a large number of X-Y-stub templates (X-sport-bio-stub, say), to the point where it might be a surprise if it doesn't exist for a given X (country, in this case), though it rather presupposes that someone will have the energy to create all the remaining templates to "complete the set". Or just when someone is gung-ho to create a particular type, but its potential population isn't large enough, or not yet clear it is, at least. "Double-upmerging" basically follows from that, when the proto-type would have two parents, though as noted, it does also reduce the amount of double (or so...). At one point I was scanning the db dumps for double-stubbings that were already over 60, but that stopped bearing much fruit a while ago. If anyone is mad-keen on systematically working these down, I could upload a list of those over some lower threshold. (I anticipate there being another dump relatively soon, just don't ask exactly when.) Alai 03:29, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
Is there a particular threshold for how many affected stubs there needs to be? I know it 60 for a "real" stub, but I misremember with regard to the "up-stubs". I personally find the asia-sport-bio-stub to be so ridiculously WP:OC useless (in the sense of arbitrary intersection) that I find it practically noxious.  :-) Might as well have blonde-sport-bio-stub for all the use that stub category actually provides. The two I'd immediately fork out and upmerge would be taiwan-sport-bio-stub and philippines-sport-bio-stub. That would reduce the actual asia-sport-bio-stubs by I think more than 50%, leaving a handful of Singaporeans, Vietnamese, Indonesian, etc., entries. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 04:12, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
No, it wouldn't; the point of upmerged templates is to leave them in the same category (Category:Asian sportspeople stubs is much too small to actually split), but fed by different templates, for the reasons discussed. Alai 05:04, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
Right; I think you misunderstood me. It would reduce usage of {{asia-sport-bio-stub}} (and, nicely, {{philippines-bio-stub}} at the same time; of course if they're upmerged Category:Asian sportspeople stubs wouldn't get any smaller. :-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 05:26, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
I think I understood what you wrote; what you meant I can't speak to. :) The categorisation doesn't change at all in such cases, so I don't see how "OC" issues figure at all, and I don't see what's at all "arbitrary" about "Asia": give me plate tectonics over China Naming Squabbles any day of the week. But it could be argued that this is one of those categories that should only have "upmerged" templates, and no "canonical" one at all.
At any rate, there's no fixed "threshold" for upmerged templates. I've created some very small ones for the sake of "completism" (typically to cover all the subdivisions of some country (or indeed sub-sub-... of same, for US counties)). OTOH, Grutness has SFD'd templates that were some reasonable proportion of the way to threshold on the basis that their Feng Shui was wrong, or something like that... (Joke! It wasn't for this sort of "partition by subdivision" situation, in any case.) I'd suggest that once there's a majority of the Xs for any given such split, creating templates for the rest is an actively good idea. For example, if sorting a stub geographically (and likewise same for -bios and -geos) I'd assume those templates existed for any country, and if it turned out to be missing, go ahead and create it in upmerged in that form. I doubt (m)any of the occupation-bio-stubs are quite at that point yet, but creating them for anything with a present population in the dozens would seem entirely sensible. I haven't seen any objection on size alone, so I think it's mainly a a function of how much effort you want to go to in creating them, really. Alai 06:06, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
Re: (mis)understand: I did originally write "asia-sport-bio-stub", which is a stub template name not a cat. name. :-) But enough of that! Anyway, this does get precisely at what I was after, so I shall proceed to effectively render the asia-sport-bio-stub template near-moribund (I'm sure someone could come along later and use it for Mynamar/Burma sportspeople, etc. - I'm only going to do upmerged ones for the extant stubs in there) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 19:50, 16 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:Stub 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.

From the point of view of stub sorting, the only difference this would make would be removing{{expand}} templates from stubs as they are sorted.

Grutness...wha? 01:03, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I've been deleting {expand} when I encounter it during restubbing (along with a description of why in the edit) except when the stub is good enough to not be a stub. I also have to question the utility of {expand} for articles that have assessment templates such as {WPBiography} on their talk pages. (Double posting this comment.) Caerwine Caer’s whines 01:28, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
Strongly concur with Grutness and Caerwine (other than I think the Expand tag has it uses). — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 03:37, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
Just to clarify, I do find {{expand}} useful, but only on larger articles which are no longer marked as stubs. I don't see any point on it as an additional template on articles already marked for expansion by the use of a stub template. Grutness...wha? 23:47, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
Right! — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:53, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree and think already read (somewhere) this is part of policy, that they should be either one or the other, never ever both. Goldenrowley 00:40, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Group touch base on "DEFAULTSORT"

How does the stub group feel about DEFAULTSORT and if we're embracing it or not? I embraced it whole heartedly for about 2 weeks, and did the whole Category:Art historian stubs category by adding default sorts so they'd all be alphabetized by last name, howver I realized it was cutting into my stub sorting time quite a bit, AND also could be hard to maintain. However if I don't do it the sorting inconsistencies will be more noticeable as time goes on. How do others feel? given a choice, or are we stuck with it? Should we embrace it? Is there a way to turn it off or BOT the entire thing? Shall we get a consensus? Goldenrowley 00:33, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

  • I think we're going with it: to that effect I've been removing parameterised sort keys from several templates I've come across that use it, and replacing the uses with DS:. (Several of these actually broke the "default", so all the more reason to get rid of them.) But that's not to say I'm going out of my way to add them to every stub... though it should be done to every bio (and numerous other articles) sooner or later, stub type or not. But in the meantime, you're right, the inconsistencies will get worse before they get better. Alai 00:53, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Not sure I understand the overarching question. It's a feature introduced for a reason, and unlikely to go away. Seems kind of like asking "should we embrace the wikitable syntax?" <puzzled> — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:56, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
The answer to that question is a firm "maybe", on the basis of the wholly erratic coding of stub templates. I assume the general gist is "should we override any DS: with the sorting in the stub template sort key", and/or "should we systematically be adding DS: to stubs in categories likely to be affected". Alai 01:25, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Guess I just don't see what the big deal is. When I'm bored, I got from bio article to bio article (the main place that DS is of any use) and convert the cat. sorts to DEFAULTSORT, and I don't see how this relates to stub sorting; the same articles would get DS regardless of whether they are stubs or FAs. <puzzled class="Still"> — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 01:31, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
The only interaction is that prior to existence of DS, and to a large extent to this point since it's not yet "filtered through" bio stub, categories are "sorted" first name first (or rather, whatever starts the article-title-first). If everything were DS'd, they'd be sorted by last name. Unless we (as I mentioned above) we override the DS with an explicit sort key in the template, we're likely to see an open-ended "transitional" (i.e., until people stob creating new stubs, to wit, indefinitely) jumble between the two. Alai 01:40, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Ah. I get it now. How serious a problem is this seen as? — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 02:01, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
I fretted about it for a while, there was some discussion on it further up this page, and at the bio WPJ, and I became convinced that the "don't worry about it" option was the one to go with. Sorting isn't really crucial for the intended function of stub types, anyway, it's really just a matter of tidiness. There's scope for using a bot to help ease things over, but the default cleanup action of AWB seems to do something similar (though I couldn't work out exactly when it was doing this, and when it wasn't), so I'm assuming it'll percolate anyway, which may encourage others to tidy up any stragglers. Alai 02:11, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
I guess I am in the fretting stage. I can't find things alphabetically when its half sorted one way, half the other. It will be worse in a few months. I suppose Alai's right it is not the crucial to stubbing....Goldenrowley 02:15, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Half one way, half the other is the worst it can ever be, but yeah, it'll get worse for a while, certainly. I'm assuming there's a point after which it'll get better...
I'm in two minds about whether to propose "helping things along" with a bot task. Firstly, at present it's likely to increase the rate at which things "get worse", rather than actually make things "better". Secondly, it's pretty susceptible to scope creep, in terms of how "fancy" the bot could try to get to do this. I may wait until the clamour gets a bit louder, or someone else starts working on it. Alai 02:35, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Ah the possibility of a Bot to default sort by last names and the annoying "The" at the beginning of titles? Sweet. I hope and wait. In the meantime, I'll try and curb my compulsion for consistency and order.Goldenrowley 18:40, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
I'd forgotten about "The"s; that would be a fairly safe one to automate, I suppose. Broadly speaking, I was thinking in terms of: i) extracting existing sort keys from individual categories on each article, and generalising that to a DS (with appropriate sanity checks); ii) working from manually-scrutinised and -filtered lists extracted from the unsorted portions of biography categories, with articles names (apparently) fitting the "Firstname Lastname" pattern. Alai 22:15, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Please keep in mind that sorts and DS are used also to fix sorting "errors" (from a human readability stand point) introduced by the compterish sorting that happens by default. E.g. Osullivan, Ronnie. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 23:40, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Some of we humans would find strict lexicographical ordering of character strings more readable than the Irish phone directory version, but that wouldn't be too difficult to add. However, it's less important that a bot deal with every case than that it handles a reasonable number correctly, and that it doesn't get any actually wrong (or less correct than they started, at least). Alai 01:28, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
Well if we need a consensus you can count me in, unfortunatey I do not have any program skills but I could see the time saved, if a Bot went through and just default sorted. Truncating "The" seems very safe, sorting names sounds more risky. Goldenrowley 05:10, 21 March 2007 (UTC)


Cleared out the last few pages in CAT:STUB

Well, we did it. We've finally got the uncategorised stubs back under control. We've gone from 200 or so stubs to one in less than a week. I went in today and cleared out the last 18--however, I've gone over User:Miltopia's user page several times and I can't figure out how it got into this category. Chyel 03:21, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

An editor has begun protecting stub templates

For everybody's information, User:Qxz has begun putting "protection" on a large number of stub templates No I haven't. I'm not even an administrator. :) But the pages ARE protected – Qxz 09:46, 23 March 2007 (UTC), something which seems to be rather over the top to me. Has this been debated at all? I doubt this is a very good idea, and if it is done, it should be done on a very small number of templates, but there is clearly no visible pattern here; {{Poland-bio-stub}}, {{Austria-bio-stub}} ???? Valentinian T / C 08:58, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Just got a message from him. Apparently, Qxz is just adding templates informing users that a number of stub templates had *already* been protected. My bad. But this still leaves us with the question about why on earth templates like {{Austria-bio-stub}} og {{Ukraine-bio-stub}} are protected in the first place? Several templates on this list aren't the least controversial and we have others that are much more used. Most of all, the list looks like a grab bag. Going through the log, it looks like User:Darwinek simply protected a number of templates around the 16th / 17th of this month. Valentinian T / C 09:15, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
According to Qxz, the following stub templates are all protected. Could somebody go through it? Some of the entries clearly don't belong here; e.g. Finland and Norway.

Valentinian T / C 09:35, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

There may be more; these are just the ones I came across today – Qxz 09:47, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
I've struck out the ones that I unprotected. There are few that might need to remain protected, so I left them alone. If someone else feels otherwise, feel free to unprotect those as well. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 15:21, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

I assume the logic of protection is that of High-risk templates, rather than controversy as such. i.e., how much "damage" some vandalistic -- or just run-of-the-mill confused -- edit would do. (Both in terms of hitting the job queue, and collateral effects on the articles that transclude them.) Recently I came across a couple that had been blanked several weeks ago, and their categories subsequently speedy-deleted as empty... (Rather carelessly on the part of the deleter, I felt, but that's another matter.) I guess no-one was exactly making heavy use of those for expansion purposes. However, as far as I know we've never arrived at any particular formula for which should be protected, and which haven't. We could somewhat arbitrarily atart with those that are now, or have been in the past "over-sized"... (Over 800 transclusions.) Alai 17:16, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

I'd be fine with protecting "over-sized" templates. Those can definitely cause damage. As long as we had a definite number, it should be pretty clear-cut. Also, apologies if I unprotected anything that would be considered over-sized. I was just aiming for unprotecting based on "controversial". I'd be perfectly willing to re-protect based on size. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 19:22, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
Not a problem, we've never (as far as I know) had any systematic criteria here for this, and the general basis for protecting as an HRT has always seemed completely murky to me. While the total number of articles transcluding a stub template is very large in total, individually they're pretty small potatoes (especially in these days where some templates have tens and even hundreds of thousands of tranclusions (and the jobe queue is often sized to match), so I don't see this as especially urgent. OTOH, clearly there's so now many stub templates that there will frequently be some sort of undetected monkey business in some of them... Alai 20:21, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
I've protected a couple of over-sized ones myself over the years, and also a few which are high rish for reasons of edit-warring (most recently {{Cyprus-stub}}, as alluded to in a recent proposal at WP:WSS/P). A lot of the ones on the list don't make much sense, but things like Turkey-bio-stub - which Amalas seems to have been unprotected - and Iran-geo-stub (due to occasional deletion of Kurdistan stub types in the past) and ones which may be liable to vandals (e.g., Islam-bio-stub) are definitely candidates for protection. Grutness...wha? 23:57, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
I left Iran-geo-stub protected, and I went ahead and re-protected Turkey-bio-stub. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 13:02, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Another one: Template:China-geo-stub is currently semi-protected. Just in case you want to do anything with that – Qxz 12:55, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

{{US-politician-stub}} (and {{UK-politician-stub}} should probably be at least semi-protected. Valentinian T / C 14:13, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
Seems reasonable. Done. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 14:23, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Chemical compound stubs

Wikipedia has hundreds, if not thousands, of articles on chemical compounds, generally found in the many subcategories of Category:Chemical compounds by element. Unfortunately, many of these are permanent stubs and low on content, such as those listed here. Wikipedia:Chemical compounds has been created to discuss what to do with all this. Deletion is arguably a waste, but perhaps some articles can be combined into lists for greater comprehensiveness. Please join the discussion on Wikipedia talk:Chemical compounds. >Radiant< 16:24, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

naming guidelines discussion

I started a discussion over at the naming guidelines talk page regarding stub categories. (Countries: adjective or noun?) It's an age-old debate that would be nice if could be settled. Please head over there and join the discussion so we can get more than just the "usual suspects" talking about it. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 16:43, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

New draft of WP:STUB

After concerns raised at WP talk:Stub 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:Stub and Template talk:Stub) Grutness...wha? 00:17, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Stubs from April 1st db dump...

Are now being bot-populated into Category:Stubs. (No foolin'.) I don't exactly how many there will be by the time the run's finished, as the number of "words" in the article isn't available in the info I have from the db, and is being evaluated "live". (Let's hope my code for doing so isn't too flakey, ha-ha.) It's likely to run to a couple of thousand, though... Alai 01:45, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Uncategorised stub templates

We seem to have prevailed on a bot tagging templates as "uncategorised" if they don't have a category under Category:Wikipedia templates to skip stub templates, on the basis that they're already categorised by topic via their stub categories. However, getting on for two hundred of them aren't in any category at all, as it turns out: see User:Alai/uncatstubtemplate. This is presumably via a mixture of complete omission of a cat, and "creative" stub template coding (the (n)ever-popular "includeonly the category, noinclude a paragraphy of chit-chat", most likely). If people want to help go through these, and fix them up/standardise them, I'd be obliged. Alai 04:35, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

People were probably inspired by seeing the look of {{Stub}}. We might as well start by cleaning that one up so people don't get the wrong ideas. I've done a few of them, but most of the list looks like SFD fodder.Valentinian T / C 07:24, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
That's a good point, I was in two minds about that one. (It didn't appear on the list purely by dint of being upper-case "S" on the draft list of all uncategorised templates, which I then filtered for "stub".) OK, let's also have {{stub}} conform to WP:STUB, though possibly after the current population has been depleted. Alai 15:51, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Please replace a stub image

Orkney has got a new flag, so could somebody replace the image on {{Orkney-stub}} with this one? Valentinian T / C 14:30, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Looks like it's been done. ~ Amalas rawr =^_^= 15:29, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks anyhow. I was a bit surprised seeing that this template was still protected. The edit war primarily dealt with the unofficial yellow/red flag, but the new official flag is also a Nordic Cross flag, so I don't think the image will cause any more problems. The second part of the revert war was about if the text should read "Orkney, UK" or "Orkney, Scotland", and {{Shetland-stub}} reads "Shetland, Scotland", but I'm not going into that mess. Valentinian T / C 15:40, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Why not simply "Orkney"? While Shetland at least has the excuse of having a disambiguation page, Orkney doesn't even have that. Caerwine Caer’s whines 23:12, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Works for me, and one person at the template talk page already agrees. If there's no bunfight there tom-- eh, later today, I'll edit it accordingly. Alai 02:58, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Sounds like a good idea. Mais oui! didn't like the yellow-red flag and replaced it with a copyrighted IOC flag, also adding the ", Scotland" thing. [2]. This was in turn reverted by Mallimak to the yellow-red flag and a ", UK" suffix. We might as well remove the ", Scotland" from {{Shetland-stub}}, I don't think anybody will confuse the Scottish isles with the South Atlantic. However, after seeing the edit history of Mallimak's user page, I'm getting somewhat in doubt as to whether it is a good idea to unprotect the Orkney-template. Which reminds me, we never got around to placing {{Orkney-bio-stub}} on SFD. Valentinian T / C 09:36, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Is the bio-stub being overused? If in deleting it would just end up retagging all the Orkney-bios with Orkney-stub, where it feeds anyway, I'm not sure I'd bother. Alai 18:57, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Why have we even got an Orkney-bio-stub? We don't normally have bio-stubs for subnational entities... BTW, regarding de-protecting, ISTR that the orkney islands page has suffered frequent bouts of POV pushing and even a fork in its time, which may be worth thinking about if the stub template is unprotected. Grutness...wha? 23:51, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
Doesn't appear to be much overused. Mostly Earls of Orkney back when Orkney was independent of Scotland, and other persons who have a connection beyond simply birthplace. Indeed, there's almost enough to warrant giving it a category of its own except that we'd be left with less than 10 stubs feeding into Orkney stubs. Perhaps once the Orkney and Shetland geo stubs get large enough to have separate categories. Caerwine Caer’s whines 00:01, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
We have it because of an Orcadian editor. It is a very unusual scope, on the other hand, how should we tag these earls; with {{Norway-bio-stub}}? AFAIK, the area was part of Norway at the time. At least technically. Valentinian T / C 00:50, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Double catting of football (soccer) players

I seen some players were double catted, some were born outside their native countries and spent his career on both countries, so i keep it in both catted. But should it be only catted in their own country which he played international match (the national team), despite some of them never played for the local clubs, like, Owen Hargreaves. Matthew_hk tc 19:27, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

I don't think there's anything at all wrong with the double-catting as long as it's not based on ethnicity/ancestry ("Pakistani" being applied to a Pakistani-British UK-born UK citizen who's only played for the UK, for example), not based on temporary/practice residency (c.f. Thorsten Hohmann, a German who is lately a resident of Florida but still plays as a German rep), or other nonsense. I mostly deal with cue sports, and since there are few team-based events in question — the Mosconi Cup is pretty much all there is, and MC has yet to see the kind of inter-nation crossover you speak of — others may need to weigh in on this issue.
I can offer Alex Pagulayan, a Filipino-Canadian (Philppines-born, Canadian citizen since early childhood, and rather recently a Philippines re-immigrant seeking citizenship there). Regardless of those legal residency issues, he has officially played as both a Canadian and a Filipino in different periods, and I would defend to the death his dual categorization (and dual stub tagging). In his particular case, I would cat him under both the Canadian and Filipino sportspeople categories because of what countries he's officially represented, and in both the .ca and .ph "People from..." categories, because he really is "from" both countries in a substantial sense (the latter because of his birthplace not his attempt at repatriatization though its eventual success would strengthen the case, and the former because of his long-standing legal citizenship and life history). If some German footballer jumped to the Austrian team, I'd personally lean toward putting him in both of the national sportspeople cats, but enforcing his absence from the "People from [somewhere in] Austria" cat unless/until he obtained actual Austrian citizenship, or he spent a sizable portion of his career not just playing for the Austrian team but living there permanently as well (and, yes, he would also remain in Category:People from Germany, or something more specific). — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:15, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Just someone cat a player from colony, but just sloely played on Portugal and their national team to double catt. (assume Eusébio). 203.185.57.117 11:34, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Category:Stub categories for all stubs?

Should every stub appear here, or only those that are a) top-level, or b) have not been more narrowly categorized? I s'pect the latter, since otherwise the category would be so huge as to be useless. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 12:15, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Current practice is the former, given especially that that's what {{Stub Category}} does. I've wondered about the wisdom of it myself, though. We might consider adding a "top level stub categories" cat, or indeed, higher-level containers by topic of various, in addition to that for the time being, and review in due course whether we need the "kitchen sink" version. Alai 18:46, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
I'd never noticed that the template was doing that. Wh'appen' was I ran across an apparently rather aged stubcat, and it had something approximating the text of {{Stub Category}} but wasn't actually using that template, and had Category:Stub categories manually added to it; was the first time I'd ever seen Category:Stub categories in a stubcat's code, thus I asked the above, thinking it might be something new that I'd missed, this adding of this supra-cat to stub-cats.  :-) I went and replaced the old code with {{Stub Category}}. This was at Category:New Mexico geography stubs. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 19:30, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
Generally it's only added explicitly when the {{Stub Category}}'s been subst'd, or there's a hand-coded variant, as is sometimes the case where there's a "specialised" alternative to the newstub parameter. Though thinking about that, why don't we just add an alternative parameter for such cases? Mind you, I've seen quite a few cases where it's been added as well as the template, for no real apparent reason. Alai 21:26, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Housekeeping (boring, but read it anyway)

When one is proposing a stub template and/or category, it would help those of us tidyers who list and close and update if the proposed template and/or cat names were listed. I don't want to have to guess at spelling, CamelCase, etc. when I list items for creation or archiving, An added bonus is that if you use the wiki code (i.e. {{tl|housekeeping-stub}}), when that item gets created, the link shows up and I feel confident about archiving the discussion.

Don't make me send the flying monkeys...Her Pegship (tis herself) 06:05, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

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