I'm not at all certain that this is a characteristic of the project that will necessarily diminish with time - I think it may be more due to the speed and ease of creating pages that are lists of topics, compared with the time and difficulty required to make just a few content-ful pages. For example, in the time it takes one person to write a decent article about Nebraska, another person can create a listing of 20 towns in the state with matching "stub" pages. I am wondering if we may be "stuck" with having a large proportion of stub pages, just due to the way wikipedia works, no matter how far along wikipedia is?
For example, browse Language. Nice list, but only a handful of the items are filled in, and many of the filled in ones have much detail. Or Agriculture, History, Cooking, Politics (now much improved), History of Science and Technology, Hobby, Music, Sport... Yes, these are very nice, reasonably complete lists of topics, all of which would be nice to have articles on, and yes there are some adequate articles (and a few _great_ articles) in there, but by and large these pages scream "WIKIPEDIA IS MISSING LOTS OF INFO!"
If this is true, then it could be a difficult criticism to shake. I think up until now, these pages have served a very useful purpose, because wikipedia's structure was geared more towards the aim of gathering _writers_, not gathering readers. Writers NEED incomplete lists; readers need complete ones. But I would argue that we have plenty of writers, and that to get more, we want to shift Wikipedia towards the users. And that means we need to look more complete.
Two ideas spring to mind for how we can address this.
The first idea is cultural. Simply encourage the creation of longer pages over shorter ones. Adopt the stance of "No page is better than a stub page" and discourage people from creating a new topic unless they're willing to write at least a full paragraph on it, and definitely start discouraging the creation of more empty lists. Also, adopt practices that give positive encouragement to people who create long articles or greatly fill in stubs - this was one of my objectives with Wikipedia_NEWS, before we got so overwhelmed with traffic that I gave up updating it and just started writing long articles myself. :-)
I know the idea of discouraging stubs runs counter to some of the essays and policies on the site, so I understand this would take significant mulling-over and might not be acceptable, but I think this approach needs to be considered.
The second idea is more direct and radical: Encourage deletion of empty lists. Lists are not *that* valuable; as mentioned above, we can count on people creating many more such lists, quickly and easily compared with creating the more desireable lengthy pages. Only leave the few links that already have significant material attached. The absence of empty lists will give added weight to the filled in articles, for the first-time visitor. Or if nothing else, weed out some of the unfilled links, to bring the proportion of "long pages" to stub or unfilled pages to at least 50%.
As an example, consider the pages Archaeology, Transport, and Computer Science, which even though as lists they are incomplete, the fact that the majority of the items in the lists actually have filled in pages (and many of them quite lengthy) makes these pages *look* a lot more complete. And of course it's *easy* for someone to add a new topic onto the Computer Science page when they have something to write on.
One argument in favor of keeping long lists of empty topics is that it "gives plenty of openings to encourage people to write about". Agreed, however we have a disproportionate amount of empty topics listed, and it's going to make the user very frustrated, and even if we got rid of 90% of them, we'd still have plenty of empty links for people to write on.
For authors, there's now a useful list of articles to be completed. For readers, they get links only to the completed articles.
Whenever we are issuing forth propaganda about the site, we should never use a count of articles that includes stub pages. It's much stronger to say that we have 8,000 articles longer than 100 words (or whatever metric we like), than to say we have 15,000 articles, but who knows how long they are.
I agree, stubs suck and they make Wikipedia look bad. On the other hand, stubs represent content that someone was willing to donate, and why should we discourage people from contributing what they can? That seems to work against the very source of our activity. But, on the other hand, maybe Jimbo is right--maybe having the question mark is more provocative. I just don't know. Who really knows how people are thinking about this, short of doing some sort of study? One might just as easily say that the question marks, if there are many of them, overwhelm people by showing them how much there is to do. At least a stub article is a start, even if it's a pathetic start.
If some of us make it our mission in life to build [Fill these stubs]? and then to do as the title says, I think we won't need to set any specific rules which might discourage people from participating.
I think Wikipedia/Our Replies to Our Critics will help at least somewhat to dispel the notion that Wikipedia is lightweight because it contains a lot of stubs.
Jimbo's suggestion that we advertise an even more restricted set of articles, as the ones we're willing to take credit for, will help a lot too. On the "what number should we use to advertise our number of articles" question, I'll post something on Malcolm Farmer/How many Wikipedia pages are there. --LMS
I wonder if there's an automatic way to search for articles that are smaller than a certain size! Even if not, it might be easier to program such a search than to create and maintain a [fill these stubs]? page by hand.
I'll try to put links to the reply-to-critics page prominently in several places (the welcome page and the FAQ, at the very least). --LMS
Hmm, good idea. Here's code to do it:
First thing, nuke all the empty pages that just say "Describe the new page..."
mkdir /tmp/emptypages cd [....]/wiki/lib-http/db/wiki/html for file in `find . -type f -size -1400c \! -name '*["]*' -print | xargs grep 'Describe the new page here.' | cut -d: -f1`; do mv $file /tmp/emptypages; done
Review and delete the stuff in /tmp/emptypages at your convenience.
Now for the fun part
cd [....]/wiki/lib-http/db/wiki/html for file in `find . -type f -size -1800c -print`; do ls -ol $file; done
This one gets a listing of all the pages which have fewer than about 500 characters worth of content. Knock the number up or down depending on where you wish to draw the line.
For example, I happened across the diesel engine page. At the time, it only had about 2 sentences of info. I'm not an expert on these engines, and I'm not going to write a long treatise on their history, design, and operation. But I knew slightly more about them than what was currently exisiting on the page, so I added it. Someone else came along later and added more. Someone else editied it to make more sense. Now it's a decent entry, though by no means completely comprehensive.
But the process is cool. The process is fun... at least for guys like me.
Some people don't want to take 2 hours (or more) to write a decent-length essay. I think Wikipedia needs every little bit it can get, as long as it is correct.
-- ansible