Two things that lead me to suspect our proportion of stubs may be slowly falling:
1 The size of the database in gigabytes has been growing faster than the the number of articles 2 Even though our total number of articles is still slowly increasing and will probably soon exceed 3.5 million, if we look at the stats - http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editdistribution The number of bytes of text is steadily rising and the percentage of shorter articles is steadily falling - take the 512 byte threshold. In Jan 2007 18.8% of articles were shorter than this, by Jan this year it was down to 11.3%. WereSpielChequers On 29 November 2010 19:15, Andrew Gray <[email protected]> wrote: > On 29 November 2010 17:33, Charles Matthews > <[email protected]> wrote: >> Stubs and how to handle them seem to be controversial still (or again), >> which is rather surprising given that we have been going nearly a decade >> now. I'd like to ask how many articles still are stubs, by some sensible >> standard? > > Currently, 73% of enwp articles have some form of quality assessment. > 13% have the "infrastructure" for assessment - talkpage templates - > but no rating as yet; the remaining 14% are entirely unknown to the > assessment system. > > Of the assessed articles, two thirds are rated as stubs. > > However, there's a massive great caveat to that: an awful lot of them > aren't. Based on my experience, I'd say anything from a quarter to a > half of the "stub" articles are not, by any reasonable definition, > stubs. It's not uncommon now to see a multiple-paragraph article with > an infobox, image and external links - lacking in many aspects of its > coverage, no doubt, but a nontrivial amount of content - labelled as a > stub. > > There's three factors at work here. > > a) Redefinition: As our standards grow higher, "stub" gets repurposed > as a catch-all term for "very low-quality article" > b) Lag: articles being marked as stubs, then expanding, but the tag > not being removed (or removed from the talkpage and not from the > rating template). > c) Drift: people see the articles marked as stub in a) and b), and > assume this is what one should be like, so grade accordingly. > > Overall, using the traditional definition of "short placeholder > article providing a basic degree of context", the sort of thing you > might perhaps find in a concise reference work - I'd say ~50% of our > articles. I *think* the proportion of stubs created now is less than > the proportion created in, say, 2006, but I don't have much evidence > to back that up. > > -- > - Andrew Gray > [email protected] > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l > _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
