Wikivoyage talk:Stub articles

Archives Wikivoyage talk:Stub articles/Archive 2004–22

"Mostly, though, stubs are a good thing" – what?

Wikivoyage:Stub articles#Pros and cons of stubs states the following: "Mostly, though, stubs are a good thing. A stub is the seedling from which the full plant of an article emerges. One Wikivoyager can add a stub, and other Wikivoyagers will come along and add more information to it. Someone else comes in and reformats the article according to the Manual of style, and someone else adds photos. Eventually, the tiny one-sentence stub becomes a healthy, useful article."

This is extremely opinionated and to an extent, untrue. What happens in practice is that a stub article is created, it is left as-is for a few more years, with the original creator expecting Someone Else to clean it up and expand it. However, the size and nature of this project means that the Someone Else does not exist in practice and the article remains untouched in its sad morbid state. "Mostly" is also a massive overstatement, because their downsides are far worse than their upsides.

Any objections to removing this statement? --SHB2000 (talk | contribs | meta) 00:53, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

That's not the only problematic passage. The whole page, and the template, should get rewritten. I commented out that paragraph now (some of its content might suit in a rewritten context, but that needs more of a consensus).

I don't think there are any good reasons to create stubs (without outline) as established user, or to encourage anybody to create them. Adding an article template before adding any text of one's own is easy – easier than afterwards. For travel topic articles, the template outline is useless, but the template contains the default MediaWiki templates, and perhaps some other useful stuff.

New users may create pages that have content but no template outline. For those the template content (headings and standard MediaWiki templates) should be added. Not a stub any more. Only if it is unclear what kind of article this is – or whether the content is worth keeping at all – it should be marked as stub. Probably one should also write a message at the user talk page asking about their intentions to continue the work, and whether they need some help. If they answer, the appropriate template content can be added, or the page deleted as a failed experiment, as agreed with them.

This page may have been written before we had the article templates, or before articles that used them were no longer classified as stubs. As such, the advice here is also about weak outlines. Even those are defensible only under some circumstances.

If you want people to contribute to a page, create a reasonable outline that describes what the page is about and includes at least some information that is either usable for a traveller or – for destination pages – explains why we would want the page (and why a traveller should look it up from other sources).

Weak outlines can be acceptable as part of a project, where you will expand them during the overall work, but need them as placeholders until then. All of them should have some useful content before you stop working on the project (taking a break may be acceptable).

For travel topic articles, one should have a vision about the article, and thus be able to create a number of suitable headings. Unless one also has some usable information to add, one should use Wikivoyage:Requested articles instead.

–LPfi (talk) 09:58, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Stubs are often worse than nothing, so I definitely don't support encouraging the creation of them as an end in themselves. Ikan Kekek (talk) 10:58, 28 October 2024 (UTC)