Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria/Archive7

This is Archive 7 produced by WikiProject Stub Sorting.

More people stubs

This is not so much a specific suggestion as a general call for more ways to subdivide Category:People stubs, which is rapidly becoming the new Category:Stub. So far, our major focus has tended to be on getting articles sorted with anything more specific than the general stub tag, but if we can subdivide bio-stubs (and other enormous subcategories) better, we'll avoid duplication of effort. What about more region-specific bio-stubs? We could definitely use US-bio-stub and UK-bio-stub, but might it be even better to go straight to, say, US-politician-stub and US-writer-stub? -Aranel ("Sarah") 19:16, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

What do you think about using a two-stub system in which there would usually be two stubs for people, their nation and their profession? Courtland 04:05, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)

separate question What criterion would we use for nation-classing people in cases where the person moves around the globe a lot? Should we go by country-of-birth (I wouldn't recommend it)? Or country of "primary association" (which is usually evident)? Courtland 04:09, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)

Either suggestion works for me, but something needs to be done. My only issue would be--what of those with dual citizenship, or born in one country and naturalized in another? Quill

In the cases you have in mind, is the "primary association" not evident? Do you have a couple of cases we could consider? Courtland 04:18, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)

My two cents worth - the two stub system is probably a good idea, since some people are more likely to be able to edit opeople from one country, other are more likely to edit a type of person. I would suggest keeping the nationalities simple at first, though - start wioth one or two obvious categories and work from there. One problem is with historical characters - we are likely to have stubs for people from countries that no longer exist, or with vastly different boundaries, and (as pointed out) we'll also have the problem of people born in one country who became famous in another (a few examples would be Precious McKenzie, Karl Marx, John Logie Baird, and Kepler Wessels). As to occupation categories, we could definitely do with a politician-stub, and quite possibly a clergy-stub (or similar name) for religious leaders. Grutness|^hello? 05:49, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

(1) For very "international" people, a specific country-bio-stub might not be appropriate. That wouldn't make it worse than at present (for those internationalist souls lost in bio-stub, it may make things better as they won't be crowded out so much!). (2) There are basically three ways of categorising a person - where and when they lived and what they did. "When" is good because even if a person moves all over the world, they're unlikely to live in more than two eras. I can imagine contemporary-biostub, 20thCentury-biostub, industrialrev-biostub, enlightenment-biostub, medieval-biostub, darkages-biostub, classicalciv-biostub etc as ways of "temporally localising" a biostub and making it easier for an expert to find. Potential problem - policy is only 2 tags at the moment, for "what, where and when" you might end up with 3 (e.g. 20th Century Norwegian writer). Is it better to sort this down by having a 20th Century Norwegian stub, a 20th Century writer stub, maybe even both if there is sufficient demand? Or keep them all seperate? Actually I would certainly be in favour of a distinct "20th Century writer" or "artist" etc because it's quite likely that some people only have an interest in certain periods of culture. Perhaps e.g. 20thCentury-UK-biostub etc too, and certainly a fallback 20thCentury-biostub. (3) I do prefer having e.g. uk-writer-stub to listing as both writer-stub and uk-bio-stub. I don't believe that having the two different stub categories on an article always does provide two lines of attack on it - both uk-bio-stub and writer-stub may be too large for them to be a useful tool for somebody with a specific interest in British literature. (4) On the flip side, having lots of new and very specific categories means that if there isn't co-ordination, the system will be very messy, so standardisation would be good. But this is problematic, especially if trying to apply historic eras from region to region (e.g. classicalciv-biostub wouldn't really apply to large parts of the world, they'd need an equivalent).

(5) Side issue: don't want to stray too far from the main debate, but I would also like to have a bonus stub category (not necessarily for biostubs alone) for stubs that almost anybody can get their teeth into i.e. where there is clear documentation of the subject on the internet, it's just a question of taking 15-30 minutes to write it up. A procedure along the lines of searching the net, discovering that there are a couple (at least two, I should think) of sites that have summaries/explanations/biographies which are very clear, trustworthy and not too long, then posting the URLs either as external links or into the stub's talk page and sticking a big "please-fill-me-in, I-won't-bite!" gold star on the stub in question. It would be especially good if users were directed to said category if they'd like something fairly simple to do. The reason I bring this up is that I think it is especially relevant to biostubs. With the aid of google, I can often right decent short, non-stub biographies on anyone from a Japanese warlord to a Hungarian mathematician (if I am told he worked out how to solve a bunch of equations I don't understand at all, I just put in an internal link!). Bio-stubs are often the easiest for a non-expert to expand and it would be good to take advantage of that: ultimately the way we're going to beat them back isn't by endless reclassification but by finding a system that encourages people to actually de-stub them! --VivaEmilyDavies 11:27, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for numbering your comments so that they are easier to respond to!

1. The point is not to have a comprehensive categorization scheme. The point is to get the categories down to more reasonable sizes and levels of specificity ("bio-stub" is really too broad to be much use right now). We don't need to get every single bio-stub out of the main category. Just most of them.
2. I recommend determining the level of specificity based on demand. It looks like one category is sufficient for Norwegian people right now. If that category looks like it will be too big, though, we should consider breaking off a few of the larger subcategories (say, Norwegian politicians and Norwegian writers). If one of those gets too big, then we can worry about whether we need to subdivide it.
3. I agree that if, say (as would almost certainly be the case) UK-bio-stub and writer-stub are both enormously large categories, it would make more sense to use UK-writer-stub than to use both of the parent stubs. I imagine this will primarily be an issue with people from large English-speaking populations.

• It's unfortunate that we can't do simple intersection/union type queries against the database; though in the case you state here the intersection is no doubt large, there are likely cases where two related categories are large and their intersection small. Is there any way we can request a query be done to assist in this type of activity, say "please tell me how many stubs are in the overlap between X and Y, and a list of them would be useful"? One way to do this on our own is in a spreadsheet application which has list-compare functions (Excel has that). Courtland 13:31, 2005 Mar 7 (UTC)

5. If you're going to go to all that trouble, why not just expand the stub yourself? Or perhaps list some good general resources on the talk page of the category or template for that stub type? -Aranel ("Sarah") 21:33, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies. (1) I agree, here there is no need to aim for geographical completeness. My point is that just because there are people like Karl Marx who don't easily fit in a category, it doesn't mean there's any problem with the idea in general! (2) Good idea. Only problem with doing it by demand is that there may be inconsistency of terminology (e.g. we might make "Medieval-Germany-biostub" include a broad period, perhaps 1000-1550, if Germany has less bio-stubs for that period, yet make it narrow for other countries e.g. for Britain that same period might be split Norman-UK-biostub/ Medieval-UK-biostub/ Tudor-UK-biostub). Inconsistency may not be such a great evil though - after all, we are only talking about stub-categories. (5) I already do occasionally leave useful links in a talk page/external links section. It often only takes 2 minutes to find those links but 30 minutes to incorporate the material, and if it's on a topic I'm not interested in I may not feel motivated to do the write-up. It would be nice to be able to label such a stub as a straightforward write-up though. Anything that helps encourage people to write more stubs up! --VivaEmilyDavies 20:10, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Template: Politician-stub can only help, even if it's further subdivided by nationality at a later stage. So... consider it done :) Grutness|^hello? 11:05, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

!!! Well Ð me, this one's already there too. Created in mid-February no less. How come no-one ever told us? Grutness|^hello?

I have discovered a few stub categories like that recently (e.g. chess-stub and norway-bio-stub - which I "filled up" from 23 to about 230 members). Would it be possible for somebody to update the main page to list all the categories? --VivaEmilyDavies 20:10, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Anyone can edit any of the sections at Wikipedia:Stub categories. (Look for the little edit link at the bottom of each table.) There always seem to be new stub templates being created without being listed, though. I suspect this is because it is not immediately obvious how one should go about doing this (or that one should do it at all). -Aranel ("Sarah") 00:27, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

another two new ones were discovered by Instantnood a few hours back (Malaysia-geo-stub and Singapore-geo-stub). Whn you find new ones, please also add them to Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types. Grutness|^hello? 23:19, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

They numbers at Meta:Image server overload 2005-03 seem to suggest that the people stub template may now be more overused than the generic stub. (It's hard to say. I have a hard time believing that the stub image was really showing on precisely 9,999 articles.) If no one objects, I'll go ahead and start creating some of the categories that have been informally discussed here. We clearly need something. -Aranel ("Sarah") 22:32, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Might I suggest US-bio-stub and UK-bio-stub might be an important starting point? Grutness|^hello? 22:53, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I agree, although I think that at the same time we should go ahead with US-politican-stub and UK-politican stub to avoid redundant effort. (We know we're going to need them. We may discover that we need US-writer-stub, UK-actor-stub, etc., as well.) -Aranel ("Sarah") 23:07, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Template:US-bio-stub and Template:UK-bio-stub now exist. From preliminary efforts to start using them, it does look like a politician subcategory would be very useful, but I'll hold off until I've done a few more. -Aranel ("Sarah") 00:07, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm on a roll tonight, apparently. Of the first 50 articles that I categorized with US-bio-stub, 8 ended up using Template:US-politician-stub, almost one-fifth. -Aranel ("Sarah") 01:52, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I think that's not just true, it's an understatement: by a rough count (rougher than I originally had in mind -- didn't realize I was going to over-fill the "back" menu on my browser!) there's very approximately 15,000 bio-stubs... Owch. Alai 02:45, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm currently focusing on Americans because that's what I can identify most easily. Template:US-actor-stub is next. I seem to be finding as many American actors as politicians. -Aranel ("Sarah") 03:59, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

What about a Russia-bio-stub (or Russian-bio-stub) template? I'm coming across lots of those (maybe because I'm currently working through my namesakes in the Alexanders). Alai 06:19, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

These are so badly needed that I would say "go for it". Template:Russia-bio-stub would agree with the current convention. -Aranel ("Sarah") 23:06, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

A thought - US-academic-stub. Seem to me to be loads of professors and lecturers. Any confirmation of that from your sorting, Sarah? Grutness|^hello? 10:25, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

There might not be hundreds and hundreds, but I bet you could find at least a few dozen for starters. (It certainly can't hurt.) Someone else already made Template:Australia-bio-stub and I just made Template:France-bio-stub. -Aranel ("Sarah") 21:38, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

This is not so much a specific suggestion as a general call for more ways to subdivide Category:People stubs, which is rapidly becoming the new Category:Stub. So wrote Aranel at the beginning of this thread. something scary - I have just run an estimate on the size of Category:People stubs, based on the first part of the alphabet. The size comes out at around 60-70 pages of stubs - i.e., twelve to fourteen thousand stubs. Grutness|^hello? 04:02, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Almost exactly 69 pages, to be precise. 13,798 stubs as at March 24 - probably more added while I was counting. Time to man the pumps... Grutness|^hello?

Africa-geo-stub split-up

At the moment there are 700-800 Africa-geo-stubs, other than in SA-geo-stub, which has 300+ more. No other country has more than 50 (Algeria and - oddly - Sudan have the most, and Egypt, Ethiopia and Nigeria also all have over 30) - that's pretty close to the lower limit for what we want as separate categories.

Unless anyone has any violent objections, I propose splitting the Africa-geo-stubs into the five regions which African countries are normally divided into: North, Central, Eastern, Western, and Southern Africa. The parent stub (Africa-geo-stub) will still work, of course, and the five stub categories will all be subcategories of Category: Africa geography stubs.

Only problem with this, of course, is the abbreviation for Southern Africa since there's already a South Africa category. My first thought on this is AfricaN-geo-stub, AfricaC-geo-stub, AfricaE-geo-stub, AfricaW-geo-stub, and AfricaS-geo-stub, but if anyone has any better suggestions...?

I'll also post on the Africa WikiProject that this is being debated here, so that they can throw in their two cents if they want to. Grutness|^hello? 07:52, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Quick count-up, using the dark green countries on the five regional maps (i.e. usual definition of the regions):

• total - 718 stubs (excluding South Africa).
• North - 191
• South - 118
• East - 87
• West - 220
• Central - 89.
• The other 13 overlap these boundaries. Grutness|^hello? 09:45, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

What will happen to the stubs about SA, will they get thrown with other Southern African stubs?--Jcw69 08:19, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

No - it'll be like Iran, which is a subcategory of Middle East, which is a subcategory of Asia. SA will be a subcategory of Southern Africa, which will be a subcategory of Africa. 300 stubs is well above the number usually considered necessary for a stub category (in fact, it's close to being too many! That also means that if a country like, say, Egypt were to eventually get 60 or 70 geo-stubs, that could become a separate subcategory of North Africa. Grutness|^hello? 09:04, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I would be happier with a split-up by country; I think it would be a more predictable classification for people like myself who sometimes add stub notes to articles in areas where they may not be sure of the exact stub category. Warofdreams 10:23, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Well me too, but - as I said - no country has over 50 geo-stubs. And Africa has so many countries that dividing them by region - at least as a stepping stone to division by country - makes a certain amount of sense. Perhaps it would be better if the existing South Africa stub category was put at the same level in the hierarchy as the regional categories (or made a subcat of both the region and the continent as a whole), and any new country specific categories that may eventually arise are dealt with similarly. Remember too that the parent Africa-geo-stub won't be deleted, so if you're unsure whereabouts in Africa something is that can still be used. The whole aim of the regional sections is more for the benefit of the editors who know where things are in Africa than us stub sorters who may struggle with it occasionally. Grutness|^hello? 23:51, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

This has been here long enough - one negative comment and one general query; no-one else seems too concerned by it. I'll go ahead with the regional split as mentioned above, with the twin comments that (1) the general africa-geo-stub can still be used for those unsure with the exact location of countries; and (2) stub growth may see individual countries split off these categories at a later stage. Grutness|^hello? 04:41, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I see by the swathe of edits you all make across my watchlist of Sudanese states and Great Lakes rivers that you have divided the Africa-geo-stubs.  ;) WikiThanks to all of the stub-sorters! - BanyanTree 04:15, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

:) Indeed so - thank you good BanyanTree! After a long day in the field, all the Africa stubs are now divided by category.I see from the numbers in those categories that the number of Africa-geo-stubs increased by about 10% in the ten days since proposing the regional split! Once I get back from a (IMHO deserved) couple of day's break, I might have a look to see if some of those countries got any closer to a number where country-specific stubs are desirable (I suspect that Nigeria might have...) Grutness|^hello? 12:20, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

(update) nope. Some are tantalisingly close to having enough - Algeria and Sudan each have 48 stubs - but even using a fairly low boundary of 50 they don't quite qualify. Grutness|^hello? 00:13, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The 56 districts of Uganda just got one line stubs, and articles for several of the larger district capitals are in the works. Anyone have any objections to a (Uganda-geo-stub)? - BanyanTree 04:30, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

56 would take the total number well past the 60 stub threshold I've been using when you add the dozen currently in AfricaE-geo-stub. No objection at all, in other words. it should be a subcategory of Category: East Africa geography stubs. Please also tell them at Wikipedia:Africa-related regional notice board when you make it!

While on the subject, at last count, the following other individual countries were close to or past that 60-stub threshold: Azerbaijan (75); French Polynesia (67); Azores (58); Trinidad & Tobago (54); Algeria (51) (these figures are about a month out of date). Grutness|^hello? 06:43, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Update: {{Ug-geo-stub}} and {{Morocco-geo-stub}} have been created. - BanyanTree 14:48, 5 May 2005 (UTC)