Wikipedia talk:Stub types for deletion/Archive 2

Adding {{sfd-t}} to redirects

It is possible that, at least for a while, many of the items coming up here for deletion will be redirects. Adding the {{sfd-t}} breaks the redirect if added either above or below the redirect line. This is ok for redirects that have been orphaned, but what about those that have not been? Should the deletion notice template be added to these? Courtland 12:29, 2005 Jun 16 (UTC)

I don't know what the official rule is, but when I've sent redirects to tfd in the past I've usually put the template on the redirect's talk page and also added a note to the talk page of the template it redirects to (so with baseball stub I'd put sfd-t on Template talk: Baseball stub and make a note about it on Template talk:Baseball-stub. Grutness...wha? 12:39, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There is a problem with simply adding templates to redirects, as has been done at {{biostub}}. Because the template text, including the category, is no longer included, whenever any of the articles are edited, the category is depopulated. Furthermore, if the articles are not edited afterwards, which could easily happen when there is a decision to keep, the category will remain depopulated. An alternative could be to include the target instead of redirecting there, an example being {{sfd-t}}{{bio-stub}}. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 07:32, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Deletion of redirects

OK, I'm fed up with complaints about redirects being deleted.

Let's just keep 'em all and hide them so that new people won't come along and use them but old people won't be "inconvenienced". That solution should satisfy most people, then some bold person comes along and makes {{About United States stub}} and we hide it away so that that person can still use it and he/she doesn't complain while not giving others the suggestion to use it versus {{US-stub}}. Then when the person who created the template tires of stub creation and tagging (which should take about a week in most cases) it will effectively never be used again.

This solution doesn't fit within the comfort zone of people who like beuracracy or neatness or nice clean edges, but it will work to satisfy the concerns of the persons this project serves ... which is not us the stub sorters.

With that said, I'd like to withdraw all the redirect deletion requests and get back to the business of making a difference, or trying to do so.

Courtland 13:02, 2005 Jun 17 (UTC)

If you withdraw those deletion proposals, I'll renominate them. We've got redirects that aren't being used, and we've had people complaining about too many "non-standard" names (check out Wikitalk:WSS). Sure, the project doesn't serve the stub sorters, the stub sorters serve the project. And the way they can do it best is by knowing what label to stick on a stub, and by making the stub names as facile for those who don't want to learn the entire list as is possible. And if, as the developers keep telling us, redirects are bad for the servers because things have to be called up twice, then the less redirects there are, the better. I like the suggestion of not listing redirect names, it is a good compromise - but I for one am not going to stop trying to get rid of any inherently bad template names just because they're now only redirects! And let's face it - the aim of sfd is to be be as much like tfd and cfd as possible. And that means there will be healthy debate with people saying "keep". It isn't a rubber-stamp to get rid of templates. Grutness...wha? 13:38, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The existence of "inherently bad template names" is the issue here, isn't it? I'm all for consistency because it is the way forward toward bot-assisted activities (which we neeeeed for this project). The problem we have, if indeed there is a problem really, is the clash between a desire for consistency and perception of utility and a clash between those who have set precedent and those for whom precedent doesn't mean much versus convenience.

I'll not withdraw the items I've placed as you've indicated you would re-post them. No need to get into an edit skirmish. If I were 100% convinced that they shouldn't be there, I'd have removed them without fishing for input.

As far as "hiding" redirects, I still think it might be a good approach to encouraging the use of "inherently good template names". Thoughts on this proposed action? Grutness has already indicated above it's not a bad idea ... looking for input from others as well

Courtland 17:35, 2005 Jun 19 (UTC)

Hiding the non-standard redirects = good. For those who are using a particular template (which is a redirect) and feel the desperate need to continue doing so, can. For those who don't know about them, they will refer to the list. Hopefully that makes everyone happy (or at least not unhappy). --TheParanoidOne 18:07, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I've made a suggestion for revisions to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Stub_types that incorporates the removal of redirects from the main listing while leaving a link to a listing of them; see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Stub_types#Proposed_revisions_to_page_format_-_aiming_for_cleaner_look_with_less_text. Courtland 17:03, 2005 Jun 20 (UTC)

First blood

{{sikhi-stub}} is the first stub type to be deleted as per this page. Congratulations! See Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion/Log/Deleted/June 2005. -- grm_wnr Esc 12:34, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

May it be the first of many. :P --Sn0wflake 19:55, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There needs to be a hearty "Mwuhahaha!" inserted in there somewhere ... --TheParanoidOne 21:38, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

...or at least a "Today {{sikhi-stub}}, tomorrow the {{world-stub}}!!!" Grutness...wha? 01:27, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

{{world-stub}}? Wouldn't that mean... {{geo-stub}}? -- grm_wnr Esc 07:44, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Template?

Hi there! I find the green template put on CFD and TFD rather appropriate, but could you please make it a bit smaller vertically? Radiant_>|< 12:40, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

I've tried to compact it a bit, by sorting the entries by type. It looks a little crowded to me, though. Anyone have any suggestion for improvement? --TheParanoidOne 14:42, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I suppose we could always reduce the font size a bit more... an alternative option is simply to reduce the number of stubs being voted on, but there are just so many that should be nominated... Grutness...wha? 00:58, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Consensus

"After a voting period of seven days, action will be taken if there is consensus on the fate of the stub type". What exactly constitutes "consensus" here? We're about to have the first one with several votes per side pass the seven day barrier (nickelodeon-stub). I'm not certain what the rule is here - is it kept if there's less than a 2/3 vote for delete, with possible renomination later, or what? Grutness...wha? 00:56, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• IMO keep if there's less than a 2/3 vote for delete. No practical definition for consensus is given, nor yet established, for SfD. So I assume that a criterion of 2/3 similar to VfD should apply here.--Nabla 2005-06-28 16:42:34 (UTC)
  • note to readers: this is not a side-vote; it is a consideration of the present voting.
    This is the eternal question around all deletes and changes. Maybe we can do something a little more intense here owing to the relatively small volume of material? I'm thinking really scrutinize the votes and think on what the issues are ...

Issue: voters

• title of stub can lead to confusion: grutness
• potential for growth is low ~ overcategorization: lochaber, idont, nabla, blankverse, lifeisunfair
• potential for growth is high: snowflake, sherri
• potential for growth doesn't matter: falphin

Looking at things this way, there's a 5:2 split on the matter of growth potential. One might but a hold and say to snowflake and sherri that if they can indeed produce 50 articles that could be stubbed to this type then that would demonstrate sufficient potential for growth to keep.
Courtland June 28, 2005 21:33 (UTC)

Purging sfd-current

At what point should an entry be removed from the sfd-current template? With items that have been deleted it's obvious. But with items like the movie/film rename, it's not as clear cut. The decision has been made, but the item is still on the SFD page in some capacity. Remove when a decision has been made, or keep until it's worked its way through SFD completely? I would go for the former. --TheParanoidOne 28 June 2005 21:42 (UTC)

• I would suggest removing it after the decision has been made. We could add to the sfd-current template a brief note saying "completed decisions are listed at xxxxx" wherever we have a log file of completed decisions. Courtland June 28, 2005 23:33 (UTC)

orphaned stub categories

Does anyone here monitor Category:Orphaned categories? There are currently 30 or so stub categories listed from user:Beland's May 16 analysis. Thanks. -- Rick Block (talk) June 30, 2005 02:38 (UTC)

That would be Category:Orphaned_categories#Stubs and yes, it's indeed worth checking out. Good find! -- grm_wnr Esc 30 June 2005 19:31 (UTC)

Added to another policy page

I suddenly realised this page wasn't listed at Wikipedia:Deletion policy - I have remedied. Grutness...wha? 2 July 2005 12:22 (UTC)

I ran across Wikipedia:Current surveys and added it to the deletion section as well Rx StrangeLove 2 July 2005 17:18 (UTC)

Several rules worth repeating from Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion

The following rules at WP:CSD are well worth noting with regard to SFD:

• Redirects can be immediately deleted if they have no useful history and they refer to non-existent pages. (Before deleting such a redirect, it's a good idea to check to see if the redirect can be made useful by changing its target.)
• Empty categories (no articles or subcategories) whose only content has consisted of links to parent categories [may be speedily deleted].
• Empty categories (no articles or subcategories), 24 hours after the last page was removed from them[may be speedily deleted]

It's quite likely that several of the items that are coming through sfd can be speedily deleted under these rules. Grutness...wha? 2 July 2005 12:31 (UTC)

• off stub topic comment that last item seems to provide an opportunity for widespread abuse by activist administrators .. that that's a comment on the Speedy Deletion guidelines as a whole and hasn't anything to do specifically with stub categories. Courtland July 2, 2005 15:11 (UTC)

SFD-Current on SFD page?

Is it worth adding {{sfd-current}} at the top of WP:SFD? No, not to have it deleted, just for display. That way we'll instantly be able to check whether what's on the template tallies with what's on the page. Grutness...wha? 09:39, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Sounds like a reasonable plan. --TheParanoidOne 10:25, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

I've added it. I've also moved the "how to use this page" instructions nearer to the top, because a lot of people seem to be ignoring them :( Grutness...wha? 12:35, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

"US"/"American"/"United States"

(Copied across from "Criteria" talk page, where I first posted it): There are numerous stub categories relating to the United States, and there seems to be no common pattern of naming. Do we need one, and if so, what should it be? I mistakenly told one person that they should use US to name a particular category because it was our standard naming, but I see now I was completely wrong. Personally, I'd prefer not to use "American", as it is ambiguous, and stick with "United States" throughout, but I'm hoping to hear arguments on all sides of this one. If we stick to one standard it will mean a lot of categories coming through here for renaming (templates, I'm glad to say, all use US). Grutness...wha? 14:53, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

• I strongly agree with not using the term 'American' (e.g. the continent) when referring to the United States (e.g. the country). Radiant_>|< 09:58, July 13, 2005 (UTC)
• I also agree with using United States instead of US or American. --Kbdank71 13:39, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
• Strongly agree with all above comments. "American" is ambiguous at best. "United States" seems to be the best alternative. DoubleBlue (Talk) 14:51, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
• I disagree with all of the arguements above but agree with the result. American is the term to describe U.S. citizens obviously. On other categories it has been already changed and I suggest the same here. The only exception is culture which on all the article still follows, Danish culture, German culture etc so should the American. The use of U.S. is pointless as it is just an abbreviation. The same is true for the United Arab Emirates. Falphin 15:10, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
• I am very strongly of the opinion that either US or North American should be used. It is a self-absorbed, absurd and derisory idea to attribute a classification that refers to all inhabitants of a continent to something or somebody from a single country, as if the other countries were not worthy of mention. That's why we have {{Germany-stub}} and not {{Europe-stub}} for articles pertaining Germany, for example. --Sn0wflake 20:20, 13 July 2005 (UTC)
• NOT "American". Categories should use "United States" or "United States of America". I don't mind if templates use US, USA or UnitedStates. --Scott Davis ^Talk 12:52, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
• If one is to avoid the use of American in stub categories, we'll need to go to always using nouns and never adjectives. The correct adjective for things related to the United States is American and no other, so if one is going to go on a pendantic quest against American, consistency of from requires eliminating all use of "British", "Canadian", "French", et cetera. I don't mind if in the name of pendantry we go after all use of adjective place names, but if we single out "American", I shall be most irritated. Caerwine 19:36, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
  • What adjective do United States Americans use to refer to something of the continent(s) of America? The issue here is not whether "American" is the right adjective for "things of the United States of America", but whether it is unambiguous. It is not, and neither are Georgian or Chinese. Australian is ambiguous about whether it refers to a country or a continent, but for almost all purposes it is an irrelevent distinction, which is not the case here. --Scott Davis ^Talk 00:22, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
    • Speaking purely for myself, I don't use an adjective for the two continents, any more than I would use an adjective when describing something that pertains to Eurasia and Africa considered as a unit. I'd use either "of the Americas" or "of the New World" if I needed an adjective form or possibly use "New World" as adjectival noun. Caerwine 02:25, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
  • But I can say European, Asian and know that Eurasian is the union of both sets, and Southeast Asian is a subset of Asian. However for you, North American is a superset of American, and South American is either disjoint with it (Argentina, Brazil etc), or a subset (Alabama, Louisiana etc). We only get confused by things like the highest mountain in Australia (correct answers are Mount Kosciusko and Mawson Peak, with a nod to Mt McClintock). --Scott Davis ^Talk 07:24, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
• I've already had to abandon the proposal of one very useful category because an "American... category" existed (the category was to be for Politician stubs for the whole of the Americas - there aren't enough for separate Mexican, Central American, South American, and Caribbean categories). Using "American" to refer to only the United States is really annoying - especially when the term "United States" is frequently used adjectivally. Grutness...wha? 23:53, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
• I'd rather have just nouns used, instead of adjectives. Not only is there the problem with "American" and others as mentioned, there's the problem as to whether some terms refer to people from an ethnic group or a country. The current mix of adjective and noun forms seems to be rather haphazard. --Mairi 00:35, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Help needed

As you might know, I've been the main closer on this page since it's beginnings. Well, I've been out of town for a week now and couldn't close the discussions. Noone else did so either, so now I'm looking at a great big heap and actually, I don't have much time on my hands this week as well. I can close some of the easy ones (orphaned and ready to delete), but there's lots of discussions requiring restubbing and I can't really do that alone. SO: Please help orphaning stub types that have been cleared for deletion! Administrators, please close and archive a few discussion, or the backlog will swell to tremendous proportions before I can find the time to clear it. -- grm_wnr Esc 14:30, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

I want to help, but I'm not entirely sure what to do. Some appear to be simple, eg. rename of Category:Computer Specialist Stubs. This has been done, so should this entire discussion just be moved to Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion/Log/Deleted/July 2005? If that is all that is needed, I'll go ahead and do it. But how about others which are more complicated? --TheParanoidOne 20:13, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Ditto. I've been closing discussions on CfD for months now, but I don't want to screw anything up with the templates here. I took care of a few easy ones, hopefully that will help. --Kbdank71 20:29, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

Template:Stub-base

I'm not sure where to put this, so I'll just add it to the Talk page. Currently WP:TFD has Template:Stub-base nominated for deletion. Since it's really just an incomplete version of Template:Metastub, and since one person has suggested that it redirect to Metastub, the template probably should be handled by WP:STD instead of WP:TFD. BlankVerse ∅ 11:53, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

{{VRC-Stub}}, concensus and resubmission

{{VRC-Stub}} and its associated category were nominated by me for deletion but they have now moved beyond the seven day period, with no votes. A single person's vote is not a consensus, so the status quo should be maintained, ie. leave the stub type as is.

There doesn't seem to be anything written in the SFD guidelines about resubmissions, though. Are they possible? How long until an item can be resubmitted? And so on. --TheParanoidOne 14:29, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Just thinking aloud here... maybe a month (two months?) after the close of voting for "no consensus"... but no voters isn't really no consensus - I'd think that in cases where the nominator is the only vote, resumbission should be possible pretty near straight away as long as it is clearly stated that no-one voted the previous time. Grutness...wha? 19:45, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Hm. I think the closing admin's action (e.g. to delete) also counts as a vote, if the admin hasn't voted already. But two votes also do not a consensus make, I think... I'd say just relist it at the top with a note that it is a relisting, and if it attracts no votes again, I'd be inclined to see consensus for deletion. -- grm_wnr Esc 22:40, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, but doesn't the vote of the nominator count at all? If there's not a single keep/merge etc. vote, obviously there are no objections to the deletion, especially if you count the closing admin's vote (although I'm not really sure you should do that, because I for one would expect impartiality from him). Btw, how would you define consensus anyway, with this community having over 350.000 registered users? Not having voted at all would constitute mutual consent, imho. And: not everyone partakes in every vote; speaking for myself, I try only to vote about issues where I possess at least a certain knowledge Lectonar 10:23, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

X-related country stubs

It may not be according to the rules, but couldn't we make one bulk vote here (I know, I know, there's copy and paste). Also, there seems to be more here than meets the eye... as the discussion wasn't properly concluded anyway Lectonar 10:11, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

There are no more Categories in the X-related change. If a proposal to change from X-related to X is made, perhaps part of the proposal should be for a batch StD. (SEWilco 18:29, 3 August 2005 (UTC))

Which discussion? (SEWilco 18:29, 3 August 2005 (UTC))

Archiving

As things stand at the moment, I seem to be doing the bulk of the archiving on sfd. I don't mind, overly, although I'm a little uneasy about it since I'm heavily involved in a lot of the votes, and ISTR that on pages like vfd voters are encouraged not to be the people who do the archiving. I'm open to any advice on this one. Also, I deliberately haven't archived one or two votes that are not unanimous or seem less-clear cut. Again, any advive or help would be welcome. Grutness...wha? 05:57, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

I probably could do this (although I do a fair amount of voting myself, and I don't always see eye-to-eye with everybody else), but I don't know the pertaining policy and procedure (doesn't one have to be an admin? how do we get it deleted, if the vote comes out as such etc.) + I'm not going to be around that much for the next 2 months. Another problem I see is that one can't avoid involvement with stub-sorting per se, and so is kind of always biased. And you do such a lot around the stub-things, I'm not quite sure if it isn't considered your pet by now :) Lectonar 10:19, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Heh. Well, I certainly feel too possessive of the geo-stub section :). I do do a lot of stubby-stuff, so I was hoping to shift some of the archiving work a little so that I can get some real-world things done occasionally. Even an occasional bit of archiving by someone else would be a big help, either here or on the proposals and/or discoveries pages. As to the rules of it and whether it's necessary to be an admin to do it - you do need to be an admin to delete items, and decisions relating to consensus are at a page directly aimed at admins (Wikipedia:Deletion_guidelines_for_administrators). But if the decision for a stub type is a clear keep, then there should be no problems for a non-admin archiving is. Similarly, if it's a clear delete and the template needs to be orphaned a non-admin can at least clear the template ready for deletion. It also begs a further question, but that's one for your user talk page... Grutness...wha? 11:44, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

I seem to recall responding with similar questions from a similar request by grm_wnr a while back. I don't recall getting any definitive answers. Given what's just been said though, I think I'll go ahead and do something if it seems like its ready to be done. --TheParanoidOne 19:17, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

I made my first attempt at archiving the other day, with the Proposal page. Did I do anything horribly wrong? I'm assuming I didn't or somone would have swooped in and fixed it. :) --TheParanoidOne 10:43, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

fire-alarm-stub

{{fire-alarm-stub}} and it's associated category have now passed the 7 day voting period. I would say the concensus is to delete both, so I started to clear it out when I saw that the template never had sfd-t applied to it. This is a first - deletion concensus on an item that was never actually nominated for deletion. Anyone using said template would not be aware of the deletion debate. Should it be removed along with its category, as decided? --TheParanoidOne 10:39, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

The original nomination was simply for the category, and the vote for that was 3-0 for deletion. I added a nomination for deletion of the category, and there was no objection to that in subsequent votes. In other words, the template was nominated, just slightly after the category. Therefore, when I removed the stub type, I deleted both. I suppose that I should have waited an extra day, since the template was nominated the day after the category, and if I was remiss in not leaving it long enough, then I apologise. But since there was no objection after six days, it probably didn't make much difference. Grutness...wha? 07:08, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

The length of the nomination was not really what I was getting at. It's the fact that the sfd-t tag was not added to the stub template which I saw as possibly causing problems. ie deletion of a template without any immediate notification that this idea is even being proposed. But anyway, it's done now. So I'll leave it at that. --TheParanoidOne 15:56, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Oop! I never even noticed that I'd forgotten that when I deleted it. Mea culpa. Well, if anyone complains, send them to me - all my fault. Grutness...wha? 01:05, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

Closing debates

There's been a couple comments on votes that are past the 7-day point, and below the marker (on the debates about {{Video game music composer-stub}} and {{Japcorp-stub}}). Assuming ones below the marker are "closed", in that no one should comment/vote on them, that probably ought to be more clearly marked somewhere... --Mairi 05:11, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Ah, I see you're a bit miffed by zippedmartins votes; so am I :)); the problem seems to be that we ought to delete them faster...Lectonar 06:31, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

That I am. The problem with deleting them faster is that there seems to be only a couple admins active here to delete them...--Mairi 06:41, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

And the ones active are active in the voting, too, and this should, IMHO, prevent them from closing the sfd's (I know thats not corresponding to wiki-reality)...perhaps I should take up on Grutness's suggestion.... Lectonar 07:25, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

is there perhaps some way we can add template "clips" round them, like on cfd and afd, putting boxes round the closed votes? Grutness...wha? 10:10, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

Bot?

Has anyone created a Bot for the replacement/renaming of templates? -Ravedave 03:13, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure there's one that's used every now and then. It's logical to use one for direct replaces - the problem comes when a template needs to be split between two or more existing ones. Grutness...wha? 05:36, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

I should to do more research. I vagely remeber seeing a bot that would present a page to you with the proposed changes and you just had to ok it if it was correct. Could probably write one that looks for the name of a state and suggests a template. Maybe I'll have to learn perl -Ravedave 05:41, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

I've put a request on Wikipedia talk:Bots#Mairibot for permission to run a bot (using pywikipedia) to take care of the renames here. And it seems like most our renames (atleast for large categories) are direct replaces, so it ought to help alot. It'd also make it more practical to tackle removing -related from the country categories. --Mairi 05:17, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

That would be very useful. The Sydney stubs await! :) Grutness...wha? 10:22, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, it's now been a week and there haven't been any objections there... I'll be offline until Sunday evening, but once I'm back I'll start the bot working on the backlog we have (unless they're any objections to the bot by then). --Mairi 04:08, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

SPUI and stub redirects

I've just had to rollback User:SPUI for his unilateral that stub redirects shouldn't be handled on this page and removal of a large block of voting. I'm adding a note to the top of the page to make it clearer that stub redirects are discussed here (although everyone else seems to be well aware of how this page works now). Grutness...wha? 00:28, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

On a somewhat related note, I noticed that putting {{sfd-t}}, which reads

‹ The stub template below has been proposed for deletion. Please share your thoughts at this template's entry on the Categories for discussion page.

Please do not edit or blank the template, or remove it from articles where it is used, while the discussion is in progress. ›, on stub redirects is actually highly misleading on the articles affected. I've created {{sfd-r}}, which reads , for stub template redirects, which should be clearer, and adjusted the instructions accordingly. -- grm_wnr Esc 18:04, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Speedying "related" categories?

Is there any way of speedy renaming the categories with "-related" as part of their names? The changes were all debated thoroughly at WP:WSS/P and the (unanimous IIRC0 consensus was to remove the word from category names (at least as far as country-specific categories was concerned). It would save a lot of them coming through here in dribs and drabs if all of them were speediable. Grutness...wha? 02:08, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

It'd likely be a good use of Wikipedia:Ignore all rules, if we're feeling bold, as there was unanimous consensus in the earlier discussion (for country names). But since it's such a large undertaking, there's a chance that'd draw some criticism. But I'm not sure how else we could speedy them... --Mairi 07:24, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Can I suggest that it they be listed "collectively" on the project page (perhaps with a link to an off-page list of those affected), and that the speedy-ing be done "by acclaim"? i.e., if three or four people call for expedition, and no-one objects. If anyone requests separate discussion for a given case, split it out to a separate listing. I wouldn't personally be upset by being bolder still, but equally it doesn't seem so urgent as to really demand that, either. BTW, Mairi, kudos on the efforts of your robotic counterpart on these. Alai 22:47, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Sounds like a plan. --Alynna 04:40, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Sounds good. I'd say to wait until my bot get's its botflag (which ought to happen whenever a steward gets around to checking the permissions page on meta...), as then it can work even faster. By then we should have the backlog cleared out too. --Mairi 07:50, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Bot work

Mairibot is now working on renaming Category:Football (soccer) player stubs to Category:Football (soccer) biography stubs (via null edits). Once that's done, I'll deal with UK-depot-stub (I wanted to start with a null-edit one), and then work thru the remaining renames. Some of them will still take a while, because of the required time between edits. --Mairi 04:11, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Done with the football player stub renames. Changed plans and am now working on the smaller Eng-club-stub. Then i'll probably go thru from the oldest to newest (maybe with a bias towards doing ones that just require touching). --Mairi 04:37, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Substology

There is some discussion regarding the subst'ing of templates, and a bot is under development that will automate the task. I would like to ask your opinion on subst'ing stub templates. Please take a look at Wikipedia:Subst. Radiant_>|< 15:51, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Very bad idea. Though I can understand it working well for most types of templates, It would cause quite some problems for ones which are frequently changed (like stub templates). Stub templates should never be subst'ed IMHO. Grutness...wha? 00:12, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Subst'ing any kind of template that changes more than rarely, and especially stub templates, seems like a Bad Idea... Also, I think it makes it more difficult for editors to move or remove various tags when there's a long paragraph rather than a short few words that are clearly in a template. --Alynna 02:04, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

• No worries, people, stub templates are not going to be subst'ed any time soon. That's why we asked your opinion before actually doing anything :) Radiant_>|< 00:11, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Template redirects

They work abit oddly now, and it affects orphaning them for deletion. Before, if you had Template:A that redirected to Template:B, uses of A would show up in Special:Whatlinkshere/A and on the page it's used on as a use of A. Now it only shows up on Special:Whatlinkshere/B. To make it more confusing, old uses (pages that haven't been edited since the change - I'm not sure when it happened, but within the past month), still follow the old method. The new method makes it alot harder to tell if a redirect has been orphaned when it's a frequently-used template that's redirected to - especially trying to change them by hand; it's doable, although an additional step, by bot. --Mairi 17:14, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Then do what I do. When it's time to delete the template, simply take off the sfd notice and turn it back into a standard redirect. It should then show all the articles that use it. Grutness...wha? 01:10, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

The problem is that it doesn't necessarily show articles that use the redirect. For example, I marked User:Mairibot/Completed tasks with {{Incomplete}} (which redirects to {{sectstub}}). However, it doesn't show up on Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Incomplete but only on Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Sectstub. --Mairi 04:10, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Renaming stub types

I have a quick question regarding the renaming of stub templates.

When something is renamed, the old name is turned into a redirect to the new name. If a template has been renamed via SFD, should the redirect remain, or should it be deleted as well?

The reason I ask is that if it is the former, anyone can carry out template renames and log them. Whereas if it is the latter it would require an admin to carry out the deletion step.

There is of course the third option - a per-stub type decision.

I can't find anything about this on the SFD page. Any thoughts? --TheParanoidOne 06:39, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Often of course, the category's to be renamed (well, "renamed") at the same time, in which case it'd be necessary to have an admin do it, or at least, undesirable to leave the job half-done. But not always, so it's a good question. I'd say it depends just how "useful" (or v.v., just how badly-named) the old template is. Certainly people are able to specify, as per AFD and RFM, that they want the redirect deleted (or not), but I suppose the issue here is, should we have an established default, where the "vote" isn't decisive on this point, or more likely, doesn't mention it at all? One could argue it either way; redirects are somewhat useful, but in the case of stub-types, not to readers (or linkers, or general editors), only to stub sorters (hard-core or occasional). In cases of erratic spacing, caps, hyphenation, etc, they may be worse than useless, by obscuring the alleged conventions for what stub-tags "always" look like, thereby leading to more confusion that it copes with. But even if the default was otherwise, I wouldn't object to doing that case by case. Alai 18:26, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Personally, I think the redirect should usually be deleted - but not always. If the redirect that left doesn't fit in with the naming guidelines for stub templates (eg moving Hp-stub to HarryPotter-stub), then keeping it would be a mistake. If, however, it's from a viable alternative name (e.g., the redirect car-stub for auto-stub), then there's nothing wrong with keeping it. Grutness...wha? 01:41, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

More on speedies...

Recent cases on this page have made me inclined to think that we need to be a bit more formal about what's "speediable", and what's not. The "speedying by acclaim" is all well and good, but if stub creators show up to protest the fate of their badly-named or entirely needless stub type, as is often the case, in practice it runs the duration (or longer!). I think we should agree some likely candidates for speedying, and have them "approved" for listing in the main listing of speedy deletion criteria. For starters, what about:

• Any stub template not ending in "-stub";
• Any stub category not ending in " stubs";
• Any template or category using a variant spelling, capitalisation, or other style of reference from the corresponding article on the main topic, and/or parent permanent category, where applicable in each case.

We can expand as necessary in conjunction with tightening up the stub type naming conventions, ideally with the latter somewhat ahead of the former, being incorporated as and when simple, established, and uncontroversial. Alai 18:02, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

{{sfd-current}}

While I appreciate the courtesy of this template, I think that everybody who wants to follow SFD has caught on to it by now, so I guess it may not be necessary any more to use the template to list all SFD discussions at CFD and TFD. Not sure if that'd save a lot of time actually but I thought I'd point it out. Radiant_>|< 15:49, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

It was only ever intended as a temporary measure... but we probably need to put something on the CFD/TFD etc talk pages before removing it). It would speed up the nomination process and reduce instruction creep, too, which can only be a good thing. Grutness...wha? 01:12, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

• I'm asking around. R[[User_talk:Radiant!|adiant]][[meta:mergist|_<font color="orange">&gt;|&lt;</font>]] 10:14, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
  • No objections on CFD talk, and not much on TFD talk either. Suggest replacing it by a simple link to SFD. Radiant_>|< 00:23, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Passing along a comment...

...that I found while stub-sorting. It was appended to Cincinnati Subway, which was tagged with the generic {{stub}}.

<!--Note to stub sorters: I would have tagged this as something other than a generic stub but have become disgusted with the deletion of redirects like {{us-rail-stub}} to {{US-rail-stub}}, which make it harder for me to get the "proper" name correct.-->

The comment was left by User:SPUI^(talk). I thought I'd post it here, so that it reach the appropriate audience. I don't really know what he/she's talking about, seeing as {{us-rail-stub}} exists and works, although it's got an ugly message on it, which is maybe the problem. -GTBacchus^(talk) 07:11, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

User:SPUI has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about this page, seemingly thinking that he's the only one keeping time properly and everyone else is marching out of step (he's even gone as far as deleting entire sections of SFD in the past when a vote has been going against him by a margin of 4-1 or 5-1). With any luck he'll snap out of it sometime soon and realise that Wikipedia's about consensus. Grutness...wha? 10:07, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

The problem is that {{us-rail-stub}} is going to be deleted because it's not "properly capitalized". Thus instead of trying to figure out the proper capitalization/term/whatever, I am now just using {{stub}}. --SPUI (talk) 17:13, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

SPUI, please don't do that, it seems so counter-productive. Doing that makes more work for me, and others who tend Category:Stubs, who aren't necessarily the same people you're irritated with. Is is really that hard to remember that "US", being the name of a country, is capitalized? Or just keep a link handy to WP:WSS/ST, like I do? On the contrary, it also seems a bit wanton to me to delete useful redirects, and I've said so in the appropriate place, awaiting discussion, but I really can't condone willful use of a deprecated template in order to make a point. Consensus is what it is, and working on Wikipedia without respecting consensus is like. . . I don't know what it's like, but it seems like a questionable use of one's energy. -GTBacchus^(talk) 17:39, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

{{stub}} had been serving us well for a long time. Then someone said "hey, this is too big" and started this whole stub sorting thing. There has never been anything wrong with using simply {{stub}}, and such a thing is not a POINT, especially as nothing is disrupted. It is merely a personal decision to spend the time writing articles rather than searching for the correct stub template. --SPUI (talk) 17:58, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

So, you're coming out against the very existence of stub categories? I mean, how was {{stub}} "serving us well", by creating an 80,000+ article behemoth category that was of no use to anyone? Stub categories are a Good Thing, they let people find articles in their field of interest or expertise that are in need of expansion. The {{stub}} template is serving us well now, I guess, because it's kept as empty as possible by a few people who've memorized all the correct capitalizations of all the categories, so I guess you can just tag things as {{stub}} and let others sort them for you, but pretending you're not creating more work for others is just that - pretending. Is it really that hard to capitalize the 'U' and the 'S' in US, every time, from now on, not just on stubs, but in every context, because that's how it's spelled? -GTBacchus^(talk) 18:12, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

I have no problem with the existence of stub categories - what I have a problem with is the notion that not using them is somehow disruption. --SPUI (talk) 18:18, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

You know, I don't care whether it's a disruption, that wasn't my point, and I'll grant it to you, if that's important to you. I'll ignore the fact that WP:STUB says not to use the old template, and that your using the old one creates more work for people who've chosen to look after Category:Stubs, and that consensus favors the use of stub types. Forget all that - you're not causing any kind of disruption, and I'll never again suggest that you are. I retract my above link to WP:POINT, while maintaining the entire content of the sentence it was in (and to which it was unnecessary anyway). Your behavior isn't disruptive, it's.... well, it would just be common (non-disruptive) willful ignorance (which we haven't got a policy or guideline against), but the fact that you appended a snarky little "note for stub sorters" makes it garden variety (non-disruptive) pig-headedness (which we haven't got a policy or guideline against). Now I know to ignore you, so thanks for the heads-up. -GTBacchus^(talk) 19:54, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

I have to ask: What actual benefit is there to deleting {{us-*-stub}}s, etc? Surely process should take second place to ease of use. - SoM 18:16, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Hear, hear. -GTBacchus^(talk) 19:54, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

What benefit?

1. Redirected templates put more strain on the servers;
2. Since all redirects have to be checked to make sure there isn't something wrong with the way they have been constructed, the less of them there are, the less work there is to do and the less likelihood that stubs won't turn up where they're meant to;
3. Many redirect names are misleading, which is certainly the case with many of the redirects that use lower case country initials. If one is kept, then very soon others will start appearing ("Hey, if the US can call itself the us, why can't we call ourselves the xq?"). We've already had to delete things like sa-stub - almost certainly created in that form because us-stub and uk-stub existed (what the hell is a sa?), and not to delete the equivalents from other countries would show a clear bias;
4. What is more difficult about using US-stub than us-stub, since in normal typing you'd type US to refer to the United States? If anything, it's harder to use us-stub, since it's a less natural thing to type.

That enough reasons? They're just four quick ones off the top of my head... Grutness...wha? 22:37, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I don't find those reasons at all convincing. In particular, #4 is empirically wrong, for many many people, in this universe. It seems perfectly natural to you and me, I daresay, but there are people who just don't think about words in terms of spelling and capitalization. I find it unfathomable, but it goes on, even at Wikipedia, and it's not the battle you want to choose.

Reason #2 fails because of this: functioning redirects encourage users to leave well enough alone. Once you make sure a redirect works, you never have to mess with it again. They don't tend to pick up long edit histories. Non-existent templates, on the other hand, that people are likely to type in, which empirically are the ones we're dealing with, prompt users to create new templates, badly formed ones at that. You cannot guarantee that someone typing in {{us-bio-stub}} and finding a red link will not just click the red link, create the template and move on. In fact, you can guarantee that's exactly what will happen, again and again, every time you delete it.

To put it bluntly - mark my words, if you delete these template redirects, they will reappear as malformed templates later on, and cause more trouble. I won't be the one to create them, but somebody will. As for reason #1, that seems to me an argument for redirect maintenance, which, rather than deleting them, consists of going occasionally to the "What links here" page and restubbing those articles, which a bot should be able to do quite easily. That kind of maintenance is much easier than the kind where you have to discover, identify, and re-delete malformed stub templates, possibly months after some poor misguided soul has created them and used them on dozens of articles. Am I making sense here? I'm willing to bow to consensus on this, but I'd like to think that my argument is at least being heard.

Oh, and I'm not trying to ignore your reason #3. I kind of see where you're coming from there, but... it seems that the solution again is not deletion but being clever about redirecting. Laxness with capitalization, I'm willing to cover for with redirects. Templates with names that are just unclear - those should probably redirect to a category like {{mislabeled-stub}}, which could be patrolled much more easily than recreated malformed stubs could be rediscovered and redeleted. We could even set up {{mislabeled-stub}} so that its stub message contains a link to WP:WSS/ST to help the editor find the correct template. Now that would reduce our workload! -GTBacchus^(talk) 01:15, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Reason 1 is the most important, and for a project that's only got one bot (which is in full-time use) it's simply not practical to use it to re-stub templates on a regular basis.

Reason 2 doesn't encourage people to leave well enough alone. Quite the opposite - it encourages people that they can create shorthands stub redirect names whenever they want. The number of misnamed redirects is going down gradually, as people become aware that they are deleted. Which they are as soon as they try to use one and get a redlink. With the exception of one or two rebels, it's very very rare for anyone to re-create a stub redirect that's been deleted. it's happened maybe twice to my knowledge since sfd went live. That sort of improvement alone shows that cutting out redirects which don't conform to naming guidelines works.

Reason 3...are you serious about "mislabeled-stub"? It sounds like the sort of thing which would get us loads of complaints of the type received recently when a newbie stub sorter added a WSS template to an article talk page. Non-stub sorters don't want to be told to move something to a different stub - they want stub sorters to do it for them. So it won't get done - we'll just have a new stub category that exactly parallels the main Cat:Stubs when we could, instead, delete the unclear template to make sure it's no longer used.

As for Reason 4, it's exactly the sort of battle I want to choose. This is supposed to be an encyclopaedia - one that struggles enough with people thinking it's not much good because anyone can edit it. Misspellings and miscapitalisations do nothing to improve its reputation, and the more they can be eliminated, the better. Page redirects from misspellings are fine - after all, page redirects aren't used by editors, they're used by readers. Templates are used by editors, and any encouragement editors can be given to spell and capitalise things properly, the better - otherwise that sort of sloppiness will carry over into the articles thmselves. Grutness 04:59, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm... thank you for your thoughtful reply. You make good arguments, and although I remain skeptical about deleted redirects staying deleted, I must bow to your better knowledge of what actually goes on with stub types. I was basically thinking aloud with {{mislabeled-stub}}, and I'm willing to pursue the train of thought, so if that means I'm "serious", then yes. What occurs to me is this - and if this is just completely off the wall and silly, then there's nothing lost in just forgetting about it, but check it out:

What if malformed stubs were made to redirect to something called {{mislabeled-stub}} or something, which had a stub message saying: This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. You can also help by replacing the stub template with one from this list. All mislabeled stubs would redirect to that, so they'd be easy to find all in one place, and it wouldn't be a red link, but a blue link to the stub types page, and if the editor didn't feel like finding a type, that one would suffice until stub sorters come along.

The message attached to {{stub}} could also say the same thing - it would be great for it to link to the stub types page, and it shouldn't upset anyone any more than the message on the {{attention}} template, namely, Please also consider changing this notice to be more specific. We could even use the same wording, rather than what I wrote above. Even if the {{mislabeled-stub}} is a bad idea, letting the {{stub}} template ask for specification and link to WP:WSS/ST might be worth considering.

Just thinking aloud, like I said. -GTBacchus^(talk) 05:43, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

I'd have no objections to mislabelled-stub or whatever personally, though I do wonder if it might not lead to users of templates that redirect there ending up yet more "disgusted" (etc, etc) than they already are with redlinks or stubs-for-deletion messages. One might want to make the wording as "gentle" as possible, if one does anything along those lines. Alai 19:06, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

for what its worth i hate capitals and am not a good natural speller but it reminds me to get into "editing mode" and check what im doing when i try a template and it redlines. with the mislabelled stub message youd probably get people complaining about a link on a template to a wikiproject. there have been lots of arguments about that at template talk:stub. BL kiss the lizard 08:03, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Speediable categories

I'd like to propose a potential group of speediable categories. technically, they're almost certain to be already speediable under the category rules, but spelling things out may help clarify things. This doesn't come up very often, but there's one on today's nominations which fulfils these criteria: Any category which is

• empty of stubs,
• not linked to a template,
• not used as a parent category, and
• over 24 hours old is speediable

These are usually either malformed or deprecated, and in stub-specific cases wouldn't get any articles unless someone added a template to them, so, by being over 24 hours old, they are guaranteed to have been empty for that time (unless a template has just been deleted or redirected, in which case, it's highly unlikely that a new one is about to be added). As such they would almost certainly come within the "24 hours and it's gone" rule for categories. Grutness...wha? 07:52, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

• What if they satisfy the above, but User:Grutness (who he) has added a "please do not delete" notice? e.g., Cat:Bangladesh stubs, and a half dozen or so others?  :) I assume these are hold-overs from the great "-related" debate, but haven't been moved-to yet? Alai 08:01, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
  • heh. Good point. And yes, they are a hold-over of that debate. I suppose if anyone wanted they could be speedied then re-created when needed. Things were in a bit of a state of flux during that debate though, hence the notices. Hopefully they won't be around much longer. Grutness...wha? 08:23, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

    I think I've tracked the last few of those down now, they're all on sfd. Grutness...wha? 08:26, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Strange problem - with sfd-t?

I've just come across a weird one, possibly a problem with sfd-t, although I suspect it's probably with {{Cayman-stub}}. Have a look at the bottom of the double-stubbed Grand Cayman. Seems OK, but the template that's up for deletion isn't Caribbean-geo-stub, it's Cayman-stub. so why is the sfd message above the geo-stub? My guess is that cayman-stub has somehow been coded to appear last on the article, but my knowledge of html isn't enough to know whether this is the real reason. Anyone have any ideas? Grutness...wha? 08:25, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

{{Cayman-stub}} was missing table and tr end-tags, and adding them fixed the problem. Not sure why that'd cause the templates to appear in the reverse order, but it's not too suprising invalid html would do strange things. --Mairi 08:34, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Possibly connected with the shutdown of the automatic fixer-upper that caused sigfile troubles earlier in the week? Whatever, thanks for fixing it. Grutness...wha? 09:24, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Assorted state highway stubs mess

Since karmafist logged the discussion without actually doing anything to the template (not even removing {{sfd-t}}), I decided it was about time to get something done. The only thing there seemed to be consensus for (and that guidelines unambiguously call for) is ending in -stub, and having hyphens. So I renamed all the templates to end in -stub, and have hyphens. All except 2 are of the form Foo-State-Highway-stub, which being closest to the old names seemed the most sensible in absense of consenus. The exceptions are {{Arizona-State-Route-stub}} (the original category and template used State Route, so that got kept) and {{Washington-state-highway-stub}} (which matches the capitalization of the existing stub category and main category). All of them have redirects of the form Foo-state-highway-stub (and Foo-State-Highway-stub for Arizona and Washington); Arizona also has {{Arizona-state-route-stub}}. The old names were kept as redirects, but the more anomalous ({{Arizona State Route Stub}} and {{New-Hampshire-State-Highway-stub}}) could probably go. If you want redirects from anything else, go create them.

My suggestion, for anyone who cares deeply about such things, would be to check the main category and stub category and see if they match as far as capitalization and use of highway/route. If they don't, nominate one or the other for renaming; as there's little point in having them be different. Individual nominations, or groups where you want the same exact thing to happen, would be far simpler.

It's a mess, but hopefully this brings abit more order to it. --Mairi 21:01, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Also, most of these categories don't have any parents listed, so if anyone feels like cleaning them up... --Mairi 21:07, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm asking for {{Washington-state-highway-stub}} to be moved back to {{Washington-State-Highway-stub}}. The uncapitalized category predates the WikiProject, and I'm asking for that to be fixed too. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 02:25, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Mairi's sounds like a reasonable compromise - as a temporary measure at least. I'm of the opinion that these should have been dealt with separately rather than in one clump, and won't be at all surprised if they drift back to SFD on an individual basis over the next few months. As for Rschen7754's suggestion, I'm strongly against it. Why have this one as "-Stub" when every single other stub template is at "-stub"? Having it as {{Washington-State-Highway-stub}} would make some sense though. Grutness...wha? 06:07, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Oops... that's what I meant. I corrected it above. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 06:31, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

It was most certainly intended as a temporary measure, with the idea that something needed to be done, and it's atleast better than what there was before. It's still far from desirable, since, for example, 35 of the 40 subcategories in Category:State highways are lowercase, while 1 of the stub categories is. --Mairi 01:09, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm happy with the standard as it is now: {{StateName-State-Highway-stub}}. But inevitably they will find their way back to SFD... Should we fix California to meet this standard? Texas has been fixed, and when I create the new stubs (at WP:WSS/P) I'll create them to this standard. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 06:43, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

I have an additional debate at User talk:Rschen7754/Highway Capitalization. --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 03:15, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Redirect deletion guidelines

Arguments are frequent on WP:SFD as to delete or not delete certain template redirects. I think establishing a guideline for redirect deletion would be helpful, such as:

Any redirect to a stub template that does not comply with the naming guidelines AND does not provide any signifcant convenience for the editors should be deleted, as it puts additional stress on servers and is difficult to maintain by WP:WSS.

or:

All redirects to stub templates should be kept, as they are a help to editors.

Or some middle way. This could be used to simplify the deletion process. Conscious 08:25, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

the first way sounds better but add "unless there are special circonstances" after the "deleted". just in case weve forgotten something. BL kiss the lizard 08:48, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Historical Fiction Bookstub

I think that this stub category should not be deleted. The "book" section already is overpopulated, and it makes more sense to keep it so that people more interested in expanding articles about novels than articles about non-fiction books can navigate more easily. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sophysduckling (talk • contribs)

You need to add your input the relevant section of the project page. Not the talk page. --TheParanoidOne 06:50, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

anyway were only talking about renaming it not deleting it. BL kiss the lizard 06:54, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Looking to help clear out the SFD backlog

Greetings.

One of the things I mentioned in my recent RFA was that, if promoted to Admin, I would be more interested in helping out with the various xFD areas, where "x" doesn't equal "A". AFD gets all the admin glory, whereas the other various xFD pages seem relegated to the status of afterthought. Indeed, when I mention SFD on IRC, many people don't know what it stands for. (The common response is "What's SFD? Shit for Deletion?")

In any case, I was indeed promoted to admin a hair over a week ago, and now seek to make good on my campaign promises. I, along with a few other new admins, have already brought WP:RFD into some semblance of cohesion. However, at the time I was nominated for RFA, WP:RFD was pretty much ignored, had a backlog dating back 45 days, and nobody was showing much interest. So when I got the mop and bucket, there were no toes to step on when I started working on RFD.

WP:SFD, on the other hand, gives the impression of a well-established process, with regular participation by a core group of folks. In other words, many toes to potentially step on for novice admins like myself who might inadvertently allow their enthusiasm to exceed their experience.

I have raised these concerns on TheParanoidOne's talk page, and he feels that I should just dive in and help start clearing up the backlog, cleaning out the more obvious discussions. So that's what I'd like to do. But I figured that a little circumspection would go a long way in this case, so I'm giving folks a heads up here on the talk page.

All the best.
→ Ξxtreme Unction|_{yakkity yak} 20:26, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Welcome on board! It's often "all hands to the pump" here. The main problem is that there's only one bot that does a lot of the major shifts (Mairibot - currently changing that big pile of "-related" categories over). A lot of the smaller changeovers can be done manually, though - and there's the logging of course... any help is much appreciated! Grutness...wha? 22:38, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

One thing that could help, even for the -related categories, is that I still end up doing some parts by hand: changing the category on the stub template, creating the new category (mostly copied from the previous category), changing over the subcategories (since the sorting is usually quite strange) and changing other (non-talk) links to the category. While the latter 2 could be done by bot, there's enough other minor changes I end up making that it seems better to do by hand. So if anyone wants to help doing those, that'd make the botting go a fair bit quicker.

One other thing is that it's generally better to leave [old] redirect deletions to be done by bot, as some of the pages that use the redirect will show up in the page that the template redirects to, meaning that those have to all be checking. And that's naturally far quicker by bot. (There's an explaination somewhere, perhaps early on this page, about the issues with template redirects). --Mairi 22:57, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

By [old] redirects, do you mean the stuff listed under the "Unfinished Business" heading? → Ξxtreme Unction|_{yakkity yak} 23:08, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Nah, I meant ones that've existed for months before being listed for deletion. If it was createdly shortly before being nominated for deletion, there's alot less chance that it's been used. --Mairi 23:41, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

If a stub is moved or otherwise redirected, is it necessary that the original stub be orphaned? → Ξxtreme Unction|_{yakkity yak} 03:58, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Depends.

• If the consensus is to change the name of the stub category, then all stubs must be editted in order to place the stub articles in the new stub category even if the stub template itself keeps the same name.
• If the consensus is that the old name of a stub template will not be kept as either a stub template or a redirect, then the articles must be restubbed or a red link for the deleted stub template will appear in the stub articles that use it.
• If the consensus is to keep the old stub template as a redirect and the category is not being changed, then while it is considered desireable to restub so as to reduce server load to restub to the new template name, it is not absolutely necessary.

Hope that helps. Caerwine Caerwhine 04:18, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Not unless the redirect is going to be deleted. Which is usually the case around here (I'd say that's what always happens, unless there's consensus otherwise, but I'm not sure that's entirely true.) I generally orphan them anyway (unless it's a redirect from a more specific subject); but then again, that's alot easier with the bot... --Mairi 04:21, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Usually if the vote is for the template to be renamed, it is implied that the original name is deleted, unless there's a specific vote of keeping the old name as a redirect. A major reason for template renames on sfd is that the current names don't conform to naming guidelines, so the (misnamed) original versions aren't often kept. Grutness...wha? 09:18, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Templates for renames

Given the occassional confusion, I've created two new templates for renames: {{sfr-t}} and {{sfr-c}} (I can't see redirects being renamed too often). The syntax is {{sfr-t|New-name-stub}} and {{sfr-c|New name stubs}}. The parameters are optional (for when there isn't a specific name in mind), and there's no ugly wikicode visible when the parameter is left out. I've left the text on {{sfd-t}} and {{sfd-c}} as "deletion or renaming" for now, until people are aware of the new templates. --Mairi 23:02, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Heh. I was thinking of doing this myself sometime - glad to see you beat me to it! :) Grutness...wha? 09:19, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

I've been bold and added them to the directions at the top of the page. --Mairi 07:07, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

"The last of the -related's" from November 24th

This is just one big giant ... mess, for lack of a better word. This has so many problems with it. Too many items proposed in one go. Some have splintered off into their own SFD nominations (some dealt with, others not). Some have been renamed but others haven't. Claims to be the last, only to be followed by some more later on. Some have the sfd-c template on them, others don't. The sheer volume of entries and the splintering also makes it difficult to gauge what the concensus is for a particular entry. I have pushed through the changes for a few but I don't think I can reasonably do any more.

So I propose that we abandon this quagmire by logging the entire discussion under the Deleted section and noting down exactly what items were renamed. Possibly a note in the Not Deleted section as well, noting what wasn't changed (if anything) and pointing to the discussion on the Deleted page. Any items that still require changing can be renominated as appropriate.

I also propose that we never do anything like this again. Ever. (Please!)

Thoughts? --TheParanoidOne 23:00, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

• It was indeed an attempt to deal with a problem at one swoop that was a bit over ambitious. However, execpt for the twelve categories that were renominated on December 2nd to explore possibilites other than a simple category renaming that had been raised during this discussion, the consensus was to simply rename them all. Unless a category from this one got relisted for further discussion on the 2nd, go ahead and work on it under this entry. Caerwine Caerwhine 03:57, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

• To be fair, it's far less of a mess than the state highway stub debacle. As Caerwine says, we probably tried to bite off too much at once, but with the exception of the 12 stub types that needed to be dealt with separately (and are being dealt with separately), it's all been pretty straightforward. it's simply that there's such a lot of work in changing things over that's made it clog up the bottom of the page for so long. Grutness...wha? 05:50, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

rename from WP:CFD

From Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Log/2005 December 14 there was a consensus to rename a number of Tanakh related categories, including

• Category:Hebrew Bible/Tanakh-related stubs --> Category:Tanakh stubs

Does anyone here think it's necessary to run this through sfd as well, or should someone just do the rename? -- Rick Block (talk) 18:13, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

It probably should, but only because whether to rename the stub template to {{Tanakh-stub}} at the same time and whether to keep the old template as a redirect if a change is made probably ought to be discussed at the same time, as less work and fewer edits are involved in changing both the stub template and teh stub category at the same time than if we were to change first one and the other. If there were no chance of a template change, I'd say this would be one of the things that on any reasonable list of things to be done speedily with stubs, tho we don't have such a list as of yet. Caerwine Caerwhine 18:37, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

definately. those should never have gone thru cfd in the first place. it says so in step 1 of the instructions for cfd.as such the discussions at cfd probably arent valid ones. then again i doubt anyone would mind in this case since HeBible is a messy name. BL kiss the lizard 22:53, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

This one already came up on SFD in the non-geographical section of "The last of the -related's" and the suggestion was Category:Hebrew Bible/Tanakh-related stubs → Category:Hebrew Bible/Tanakh stubs. I mistakenly took the {{cfd}} tag on the category as an {{sfd-c}} tag and created the latter category. Currently, roughly half of the 300+ stubs have been moved over to the new category. --TheParanoidOne 23:47, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Delete this page?

Please note that SPUI has taken his WP:POINT crusade against this page to the village pump. Radiant_>|< 03:24, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

• you might also want to look at this: [1]. Grutness...wha? 03:26, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
  • That appears to be a severe case of WP:POINT. I have blocked SPUI for 24 hours. Radiant_>|< 03:43, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
    • Note: The MFD for this page, previously on speedy delete, has been reopened. xaosflux ^Talk/_CVU 04:06, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Reviving the RFD/SFD discussion regarding stub redirects.

Greetings.

I have revived the discussion regarding the issue of where stub redirects should properly be addressed on the RFD talk page. My comments there are, in the main, a repost of my comments on WP:VPP, with some minor refactoring.

Executive summary: At the time SFD subsumed the task of dealing with stub redirects, RFD was inactive and not under regular admin scrutiny. Thus, nobody was reading the RFD talk page, which is why nobody objected to SFD taking over the task of dealing with stub redirects.

RFD is now once again under regular admin scrutiny. Thus, the issue of where stub redirects should be handled should be revisited.

My comments on the RFD talk page provide greater detail. Interested parties are cordially invited to swing by and provide their insight.

All the best.
Ξxtreme Unction|_{yakkity yak} 14:50, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Restoration of some redirects

Per WP:DRV#Various stub template redirects, I have restored some stub redirects deleted by this process. Please see my comment at DRV for my reasoning. -Splash^talk 23:26, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

• why wasnt anyone here told this was going on? those redirects were deleted for good reasons! shouldnt we have been told that someone was thinking of remaking them? BL kiss the lizard 05:21, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

The impact of template redirects

Extreme Unction has initiated an interesting discussion on the actual impact of template redirects. --TheParanoidOne 00:58, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Indeed. Jamesday's proposed solution is particularly interesting, since it would effect the very proliferation of stub names the stub-sorting project has heretofore attempted to avoid. On the other hand:

I like the solution he offers, not least because any instances where the editor saves an article with a soft-redirected template but either doesn't notice the message or doesn't bother to clean it up can be fixed by a bot (which currently can't be done for normal template redirects because of the bug that breaks their Whatlinkshere). Of course, it would require either that a list of such soft-redirects is maintained somewhere, or that the boilerplate text contains a link to Wikipedia:Don't use template redirects or a similar page. —Cryptic (talk) 01:34, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

So rather than deleting usefully named stub-redirects, the suggestion is to turn them into quasi-stubs (perhaps with a Category:Quasi-stub to generate a list of pages which use them) and let a bot sort 'em out. Ξxtreme Unction|_{yakkity yak} 12:56, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

"Jamesday's proposed solution is particularly interesting, since it would effect the very proliferation of stub names the stub-sorting project has heretofore attempted to avoid". well you could read it that way. but what he basicaly says is that redirects to templates should be avoided. those that exist can be replaced with a quasistub but theres no reason at all to make any more since they cause problems to the servers. and any that do exist are so strongly discouraged that theres little or no point having them. so it looks like the solution he makes is one that should only be used if theres no better option like deleting the template redirects. BL kiss the lizard 23:41, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Jamesday's solution is an interesting one, and I think it'd be worth giving it a try on a few pages that are currently redirects. Something like movie-stub or car-stub would seem to be a good candidate for a test, as as they're likely used often but offer little advantage over the non-redirect forms. It wouldn't really work for redirects that're possible future splits, as in some sense we want those to be used. The idea also allow the possibility of "disambiguation" stub templates, should we want those... --Mairi 08:57, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

{{deletiontools}} vs {{deletiondebates}}

Ashibaka changed the template on the SFD page from deletiontools to deletiondebates. From Template talk:Deletiontools:

It was reverted on RFD, but none of the other pages seemed to care really (or they like the new one better). Ashibaka tock 02:07, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

So, does anyone care? Personally I'm inclined to leave the new template as it seems less ... cluttered. --TheParanoidOne 13:03, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Western Sahara stub

a word of warning. {{Western sahara stub}} was deleted without being orphaned! ive just gone through and changed everything to {{WesternSahara-stub}}. please make sure templates arent in use before removing them! BL kiss the lizard 23:55, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Are you sure on the casing for that? There doesn't appear to be any deleted edits for it. I know that for {{Western Sahara stub}}, I got my bot to make the changes and then I manually went through the What Links Here list. The fact that some weren't done is a little ... worrying. --TheParanoidOne 06:57, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Hmm. Perhaps my bungling of the template rename caused the system to become confused. :shrug: --TheParanoidOne 06:59, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, {{fest-stub}} also wasn't completely orphaned before it was deleted. Conscious 07:23, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Oh dear. Something is clearly not right, then. --TheParanoidOne 06:10, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

it was {{Western Sahara stub}} (sorry) - i manually changed over about 40 stubs that still had this after it was deleted. BL kiss the lizard 09:42, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

I think I've found a solution. Carrying out null edits on the category forces the articles to update their information about what templates they use. Whatlinkshere should then be populated with the correct items. (I hope). --TheParanoidOne 14:00, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Template:sfd-current

{{sfd-current}} is no longer used (it even says on it that it's deprecated), so I'm taking it to tfd. Hopefully there are no objections to that...? Grutness...wha? 06:50, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

What happened with the anti-pope stubs? What happens now?

Here was a discussion about {{Anti-Pope-stub}}, which was created out of process and without discussion on January 1. I don't see that the discussion had reached a consensus - it was perhaps headed towards merge/rescope {{Pope-stub}}. The discussion was terminated and logged, and the template was deleted, but nobody rescoped {{Pope-stub}}. A robot came along and changed all the {{Anti-Pope-stub}}s into {{Pope-stub}}s anyway, so the creator of {{Anti-Pope-stub}} just started dumping them back into the generic {{Stub}} category, because {{Pope-stub}} was clearly inaccurate. I went around after him and double tagged them all with {{RC-stub}} and {{Reli-bio-stub}}, and figured the mess was over.

Now, {{Anti-Pope-stub}} has been undeleted and renamed to {{Antipope-stub}}. Nobody bothered to create the category, so I just now did that, so the stub wouldn't be category-less. That brings us up to date. (I haven't tracked down exactly who did most of these things, because that's essentially irrelevant to the real question, which follows...)

We should, at this point, EITHER Rescope {{Pope-stub}}, rewrite the message accordingly, move the antipopes into it, and delete {{Anti-Pope-stub}} (now a redirect), {{Antipope-stub}}, and Category:Antipope stubs... OR just deal with {{Antipope-stub}} now that it's properly named and attached to a category. Which'll it be? Should I be bringing this up at Discoveries, or Stubs for Deletion, or where? -GTBacchus^(talk) 04:39, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Some of my comments on the aftermath of this are here. --TheParanoidOne 06:24, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

(Just ranting away - this doesn't all necessarily apply in this case) I dislike it when people, particularly who were involved in a deletion discussion, reverse the actions of an admin (who was hopefully not involved) closing the debate. Especially when they don't discuss it with the admin involved, or atleast mention it to them, beforehand. I'd much rather see the person try to convince the admin that their decision was wrong (which might save everyone time and trouble), ask another admin/user to take whatever action the person wants, or even use WP:DRV (which exists to handle such cases). Mairi 07:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I'll second that rant (inapplicable as it may be), and add a link to another fragment of this discussion: User talk:Musical Linguist#Stub template for anti-pope, where I'm attempting to sound out how those with strong feelings feel about a couple of different options we have at this point. -GTBacchus^(talk) 08:16, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

FWIW, Anti-Pope-stub is the re-creation of a previous deletion, so it can be speedied. Grutness...wha? 09:17, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Though as that wasn't really by consensus, perhaps better to wait 24h, and speedy it as "empty", instead. (Which is somewhat ironic, given that all the while the template was being created, debated, and recreated, the category didn't even exist.) Alai 16:22, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Thank you, GTBacchus, for the trouble you've taken. I voted to keep and rename, but I would certainly have been open to changing my vote to "change wording of pope-stub, and use the same stub template for both". Looking at the vote as it stood just before the discussion was closed, I cannot see any consensus for deletion, but it is reversible, so no need to make a fuss!

I won't discuss the technical issues, as I don't fully understand them, although the knowledge that stubs should not be created unless they will have sixty articles would influence me into changing my original vote. I will just make three comments:

1. As a committed Catholic, respecting that Catholic doctrine should not be affirmed on Wikipedia, but trying to make sure that it's not denied either, I do have a problem with a biography of an antipope saying at the end that this article is about a pope.
2. If the pope stub template is reworded to say something like "a pope or a claimant to the papacy", I have absolutely no objection to using the {{pope-stub}} template. To object on the grounds that the coding has the word "pope" would, in my view, be extreme and unnecessarily uncompromising.
3. If the idea behind these stub templates with categories is that people with knowledge in a certain area can easily find a page that links to all the stubs that belong to their field of expertise, then I think combining popes and antipopes is quite a good idea. I think that the religious biography stub isn't specific enough. It could be suitable for lots of very different people — Elisabeth Leseur, Michael Scanlan, Karl Keating, Jacques Fesch, etc. I'm not saying that they're all stubs, just that someone who knew quite a lot about one might have never heard of another. Whereas a Catholic historian who knew enough to add to articles about popes who lived fifteen hundred years ago would probably know about some of the antipopes too, and would be interested in them. So from the point of view of trying to help people to find all the stubs that belong to their area of expertise, having popes and antipopes together would be quite a good idea.

If a decision is made to delete the antipope stub template again, please wait until the pope template has been made suitable. I could easily add the words "or a claimant to the papacy", but I wouldn't attempt to start creating categories. I'm afraid that's beyond me at the moment.

This discussion has taken place on my talk page, Str1977's Patsw's, GTBacchus's, TheParanoidOne's and Chooserr's and probably others as well. Perhaps, to avoid fragmentation, we could complete the discussion here? Thanks. AnnH ^(talk) 01:29, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

I concur with AnnH. patsw 01:43, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm adding a comment made by Str1977 on my talk page:

Now in regard of the "anti-pope stub template" I agree: if it is properly worded so that no undue "relativist bias" creeps in, the pope and anti-pope stubs can be merged. The Pulvermachers of our time however should remain excluded. Str1977 14:17, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Pulvermacher, of course, refers to Lucian Pulvermacher, a modern antipope. There are others, for example Clemente Domínguez y Gómez. Such antipopes do not, in my view, belong to the same category as the antipopes from the third to the fifteenth centuries. However, maybe we could try to ensure that the relatively modern antipopes all have articles rather than stubs, so that we don't have to worry about which stub template to use! AnnH ^(talk) 01:59, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I'm gonna go ahead and be bold. Please feel free to change the wording, or revert me entirely, if it seems necessary. Meanwhile, I'm off to move the anti-pope stubs to their new category. -GTBacchus^(talk) 01:47, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks again, GTBacchus. You've been very helpful. AnnH ^(talk) 01:59, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm moving another comment here from my talk page:

Hi Ann (and all). Only just found out that this was deleted (and recreated) while logging another deletion. ("Blue-links" in the deletion log rather leap out at one.) Sounds like we have an emergent consensus here -- this is a lot like the discussion it would have been more useful to have on SFD in the first instance. Regarding RC-stub (or RC-clergy-stub) vs. (a rescoped) pope-stub as destinations: the first has the merit of following the permanent categories (which has Cat:Antipopes quite separate from, and not subcatted within Cat:Popes); while the second would possibly be more useful for likely stub expansion purposes, as presumably students of the papacy will often have an interest in the "antis", and more so than editors of Catholicism topics generally, I'm guessing. But I'm easy either way. At any rate, as the antipope category is currently empty, and there seems to be no-one edit-warring to refill it, this will soon be "speediable" (much as I agree that the original deletion didn't have any sort of consensus). So if everyone is more-or-less happy that these stubs end up in one of the above other locations... Alai 16:12, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

And yes, I fully agree that students of the papacy would have an interest in antipopes, so having pope and antipope together would be useful for stub expansion purposes. AnnH ^(talk) 02:12, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

As this indeed remains empty after 24h, I'll shortly speedy this, unless there are any objections in the immediate future. Alai 21:21, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Done. Alai 06:00, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Stub images

[2] Developer Jamesday has requested that images only be used for content, not decoration. The reason for this is that images cause a major server load problem; the actual size of the image is not really relevant. Hence, please remove images from stub templates, and use formatted or colored text instead. Radiant_>|< 11:17, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Could you specify this? Could you give some examples of what is ok and what is not? Most country-related stub templates contain the flag of the country. Are they a burden on the servers? Aecis ^{Mr. Mojo risin'} 22:36, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

• It seems that Developed Brion VIBBER holds the opposite view, so it's probably not that big a deal at the moment. Radiant_>|< 00:23, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

The three-step plan

I see most other deletion process pages now have a handy-dandy table showing the three 9or four) steps to listing something for deletion. Should we do the same thing here, or is it complicated because of our double template/category process? Grutness...wha? 01:59, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Banging on about speedies yet again...

This preamble states that (truly) empty categories can be speedied after 24 hours. This a) isn't very useful, as typically an "empty" stub category has at least a stub-template, and b) isn't consistent with WP:CSD C1, which specifies empty for four days. I suggest we modify this in both respects: they're speediable if they contain no articles for four days. Alai 22:13, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

To my way of thinking the reason why the preamble says "Empty categories with no corresponding template" is that they generally represent mistakes or malformed newbie attempts at creating a stub type. If there is a proper stub type with both category and template, simply being empty should not be a speedy reason -- it might be that articels had recenly been sorted out of it, adn more were likely to be sorted in in a short time. Let such types go through the regualr deletion process. For the "empty with no template, I do agree that the time should match on this page and on WP:CSD and I think 4 days is better than one. DES ^(talk) 22:33, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree somewhat about the out-sorting possibility, though as stub categories are supposed to have 60 articles+ in them (or at least, corresponding wikiprojects), it's not especially likely to happen for a "stub type in good standing". I think C1 already covers this, though: If the category isn't relatively new, it possibly contained articles earlier, and deeper investigation is needed. So I'd favour a reading (or better yet, a rewriting) of that clause to cover (article-space) categories containing only templates and other project-space transclusions, which are in effect incidental to the category per se. (As opposed to categories of templates, or of project-space pages.) Alai 23:41, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

• If a stub type is peroperly proposed and initally has 60 or more stubs, but via stub-sorting or expansion becomes empty, I think we should not speedy delete it -- it is at least possible that more entries will be commong, and so deletion ought to be discussed. A recently created and empty stub type is a different matter. I am going to change the instruiction text to match the WP:CSD page and this discussion. DES ^(talk) 17:25, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Whatlinkshere fixed?

See Wikipedia_talk:Templates_for_deletion#Whatlinkshere_appears_fixed. Grutness...wha? 09:11, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

weirdness (and potential big problem?) from Alai's list

One of the categories on Alai's recent list of small uncleared stubs was Cat:B stubs. Not only was the category name strange, but the seven stubs in there were unrelated to each other. It was only when i edited the articles that I saw the strange - and potentially very troubling - reason. A standard stub template - a parametered stub template - had been substed on all of the articles. The wording of the template therefore became whatever anyone wanted, and all the stubs were dutifully put into the same category. Not only did this make the category as random as Cat:Stubs, but it gave a very good indication of why parametered stub templates are a bad idea - there were some very odd choices for stub type names (have a look at [3], and [4], and maybe [5]!). Trouble is - where is the original of this template that has been diligently copied into articles six tinmes, by six different editors? Grutness...wha? 12:33, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

I was pretty puzzled by those too: now I'm even more so. One of the editors that placed those seems to have been recently active, I've asked if s/he can shed any light. Certainly there's no template with a name that obviously corresponds. Don't get me started on parameterised stub templates... Alai 01:43, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Ah-hah! I think I understand what's happening here. Some people have been copying the example of how to create a new stub type, and putting it into articles. It's phrased in terms of "articles related to A", in "category B". If they cut and paste, and forget to fill in B... Obviously these things have to be fixed in any event, regardless of whether they fill in the category correctly: the incorrect category has the happy effect of making them easier to find! I don't think they're using subst at all. (And I say this after an increasing puzzled session looking for them. For one thing, if it had a B stubs category link hard coded into it, it would show up on "what links here". I can't search the full text, but nothing in the template space, with "stub" in the title, of 262 bytes or so of length (as it'd have to be if it were coded as suggested) look at all suspicious; they all have 'sensible' categories associated with them). Alai 02:32, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

aah. That makes sense - though it's a pretty silly mistake. We'll have to keep an eye on Cat:B stubs in future! Grutness...wha? 05:42, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

We need a speedy criterion on size.

I think we quite clearly need a) a more crisply worded stub creation size threshold, and b) a speedy deletion criterion to back it up. Otherwise, we're just endlessly wasting our time trying to delete these unilateral undersized splits that the splitters turn up to vote to keep, regardless of our current "rule of thumb", on the basis that their category deserves special pleading. Or simply that they don't give a hoot about sorting to usefully sized stub categories in the first place, and in some cases, have anything much to do with the actual project. If this continues to its illogical conclusion, we'll end up with 400,000 stub articles in about 100,000 different categories. (Aside from the US-bio-stubs, which will remain in the thousands, indefinitely...)

Specifically: I suggest that if a stub category is under ten articles for a month or more, and contains no sub-categories, it be considered speediable. Alai 07:00, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I agree that it would certainly be useful, but how would we go about implementing it? There are enough complaints about "stub autonomy" as it is - trying to implement a speedy deletion policy will probably just put more people's backs up. Any suggestions as to how to implement this without annoying people? Grutness...wha? 23:50, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm certainly not suggesting we implement it unilaterally. If there's a degree of agreement here, we can then list a straw poll under current surveys if we want to "policy-ise" our existing size rule-of-thumb, or some approximation thereto; and/or propose it at the WP:CSD page as a new criterion there. If it gets the proberbial category five shitstorm of opposition, then fair enough, it's a non-starter. If there's a consensus for it, I doubt it'll be especially controversial in practice: I'm sure we're getting lots of "I'm voting keep because my chums and I created it, and there's no reason not to" opposition to what should be no-brainer deletions, that with a clearer policy would just be, well, equally non-brainer, but actual deletions. Alai 05:00, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

I definitely support this, especially if there's a general consensus. Conscious 05:43, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

sounds like a great idea and ten stubs for a month sounds a good threshold, tho how we can be sure its been that level for that long...? BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 06:03, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

What we need is a bot that could be run at regular intervals to list all stub categories with < 10 articles for > 1 month. --Bruce1ee 08:56, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

It'd be pretty easy to do from the db dump; those seem to happen every week or so, so they'd provide fairly respectable samplings. (Or if a bot were to be used, it need only run on a candidate list that could be constructed in that manner.) Alai 18:04, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Point of order

So now that we're listing new dates at the top... How are we listing nomination subsections within a date? Most recent to the top of the current section, or the bottom? We don't seem to be being 100% consistent about this at present. Alai 17:42, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

I've been adding new entries at the top, seeing as that's what the instructions say. Also, the overall ordering of this page hasn't changed. --TheParanoidOne 21:13, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

oh - ive peen putting them at the bottom of individual days :) most days are short enough that it wouldnt make much difference, but perhaps the top is the best place. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 21:49, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Haha. We all fail at consistency :) --TheParanoidOne 22:06, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

oops - me too. I've been putting them at the bottom. The top is probably better for consistency, though. Grutness...wha? 22:54, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Novel stubs not deleted

I have logged {{gothic-novel-stub}}, {{philos-novel-stub}} and their associated categories under Not Deleted based on the requests by Eagle 101 to populate them using Gnome (Bot). I think it would be prudent to review these again in about a month. --TheParanoidOne 21:46, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

I think that's fair enough for the gothics, but is the "philosophical novel" a concept we want to entertain, at any population? Even Eagle seemed a little vague as to how he was going to regex for "philosophicalness". (Besides "(Kundera|Pirsig)", I suppose.) I suppose the permie is an unfortunate precedent... So I'm putting it on CFD. Alai 22:07, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Extra instruction on SFD page

Please note that there's a new instruction on the SFD page for anyone deleting categories and templates. Eagle 101 has told me that leaving redlinks on the Stub type list stuffs up the automated counting, so it's very important that anyone deleting stub types removes them from the big list when they do so, rather than waiting until the discussions are archived. Grutness...wha? 03:09, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it's reasonable for all of SFD to grind to a halt to facilitate a process that's sprung out of nowhere. (Mind you, relatively few of the nomination will even be on SFD.) IMO, if Eagle's bot falls over on redlinks, it shouldn't yet be running "live" at all. Conscious did a systematic semi-automated update just days ago, there's no sense in rushing into this. Alai 04:51, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

You know, I'll go with that.Eagle (talk) (desk) 04:58, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

I will try to fix the red link problem, but still please try to delete the categories from the page as soon as possible.(I'll remove the boxes, but will still leave the message.

That's obviously good practice, for various reasons. I must fess up to having "pulled the trigger" and not checked if the now-ex-type was listed on /ST... (mea maxima culpa). Alai 05:39, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd always done it at the same time as the archiving, and thought that was standard practice. Clearly not :) Grutness...wha? 07:04, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

SFD comes of age

Congratulations to SFD - it has officially come of age! Today, it got its first "bad faith" nominations by someone from outside WP:WSS... Grutness...wha? 01:13, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Another possible speedy criterion?

I'd like to suggest an addition to the speediable criteria - any stub type that has been proposed and rejected at WP:WSS/P, but gets created anyway. Grutness...wha? 18:41, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

• Comment--Is it nessasary to remove these any faster than we do now???, My opinion(and vote) hinges on the quality of the answear to this questionEagle (talk) (desk) 21:37, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
  • definitely - the faster the better. If a stub type has been declined, there's usually a very very good reason. There have been cases in the past where someone has decided to go ahead and create the stub anyway. Given a week, a dedicated editor could easily move 1000 stubs. If the declined stub type was one that cut across several existing categories, we'd then have to re-sort all those 1000 stubs back into the categories they came from - a long and tedious job. Speedy-deleting these templates would greatly reduce the possibility of being faced with a huge number of stubs to re-sort. Grutness...wha? 23:14, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
    • COMMENT you stated "possiblity" has what you described above actually happend. Plus the admins could just blcok the user untill the template was deleted???(I'm just playing Devil's Advocate) My opinion is still up in the air.Eagle (talk) (desk) 23:31, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
  • It has happened (though thankfully not with 1000 stubs). And since the proposal page is only a WP guideline, not a policy, there probably wouldn't be enough grounds for blocking. Also, if the template was created by an admin, then (s)he could instantly unblock him/herself. Grutness...wha? 00:08, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
    • I'm liking the idea, but here is the devil agian...Aren't admins supposed to be trustable?? When has it happend?? Is it not bad form for an admin to unblock him/herself if they have done wrong?? (I read this somewhere, cant recall the location) Are there other provisions under speedy delete critiria that cover this. (such as bad name, ect). Why has unproposed been such a strong reason here for some speedy deletes???Eagle (talk) (desk)
    • Ok try those...Actually this sounds like a good idea...but I think your arguments could use a little clairification, that is the reason I have been playing devil's advocate. Please realize I am not trying to be combative here, I am just comming up with arguments that others may have against this. In all honesty I am trying to stimulate healthy debate.
    • Plus...How exactly do we get this into the speedy delete criteria???(the "We" is pending your responses to my inner Devil:-))

• On the one hand, people (outside WP:WSS) probably would resist the idea of WP:WSS/P becoming in any way official. On the other hand, it being rejected indicates that there's consensus that the stub type ought not to exist, which generally ought to be grounds for deletion (for any sort of page). Mairi 05:32, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

• I'm concerned this might not have the perverse effect of making people less likely to even bother proposing them at all (unless we also make failure to propose them also a "deleting offence"). Also, what's the standard for "rejection" as such? Lack of a consensus to create? A consensus not to create? (Meaning in either case, 51%, 60%, 66.7%, 70%, 75%...) Alai 00:08, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Undersized Stub Type Watch -- update

I've compiled another list of stub types with <40 articles (and no subtypes) at User:Alai/Small stubs3. Please update (by striking through, etc) as you take 'em here, or to discoveries, or deem them already dealt with. These are from the 16th March db dump, minus four recent deletions. Alai 21:51, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Is there any particular reason why you are creating seperate pages, rather than just updating the original? --TheParanoidOne 23:28, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

I suppose largely as the original(s) are at least somewhat "marked up" with notations as to which have gone to SFD, etc. If people would prefer a non-moving target, I could always "archive" these to another location instead. Alai 23:55, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Stub cat up for renaming at CFD

Cat:Georgia school stubs is up for renaming to Cat:Georgia (U.S. state) school stubs as part of a block nomination on georgia categories at WP:CFD#Georgia state schools categories. Given that it's a block nomination it's probably best handled there, but I thought I'd better notify anyone here who doesn't watch CFD. Grutness...wha? 01:36, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Category redirects

I've been going through Special:Unused categories and Special:Wanted categories (which explains the recent flurry of stub types appearing at SFD). I notice a few category redirects: Cat:Colour stubs, Cat:Indonesia-related stubs, and {{US train station stubs}}. Is it OK to delete these now? The moves involved in the first two at least was quite some time ago... Grutness...wha? 06:53, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Kosovo-geo-stub at deletion review

Title says it all, really: Wikipedia:Deletion review#Template:Kosovo-geo-stub. Grutness...wha? 08:41, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Abriviations

Can we please make it a policy to speedy rename abriviations they only serve to unnecesarily cluter this process. --Cat out 12:18, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

• It's not the straightforward renames that cause the "clutter". But renames following an already clearly established pattern should be speediable, yes. OTOH, this is still the logical place to list them for such. Alai 15:42, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
• I wouldn't mind a speedying for abbreviations in categories, but some abbreviations are used as standard for templates. Mind you, I agree with Alai's point that speedy renaming any that don't conform to the standard pattern could make sense. It could be handled with a separate (possibly transcluded?) section at the top of the page, like at WP:CFD. Grutness...wha? 23:38, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

  I wouldnt mind that. A simple and seperate confirming stage is fine. It would be also nice to pint out legitamate abriviations which can also be deabriviated for consistancy. Redirects can handle the details... :)

  --Cat out 13:52, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

  It's probably fair to say we could stand to be more explicit in the naming guidelines about what's our "custom and practice" about abbreviations and the like. Technically that wouldn't actually make them speediable, but close enough. I personally think there's a lot to be said for the "speedy by acclamation", mind you. Alai 07:27, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

  We've got to do something about this problem one way or another. A speedy rename by acclamation seems like a good idea. It will save a lot of effort, too. Valentinian ^(talk) 12:39, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

  It is a GOOD idea, Valentinian. --Siva1979^{Talk to me} 16:50, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

  It wasn't intended to be so much an idea, as merely descriptive. Though I suppose we could do more acclaiming... Alai 18:14, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Alternatively we can make all new stub types that weren't proposed speediable. This would take care of a lot of the issues.

• Unlike any other process, stubs have a very solid naming convention and rules.
• Renaming can happen even before the stub template and category is been created.

--Cat out 19:15, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

That would be wonderful - but it would also cause major rebellion among Wikipedia's editors. A lot of them seem to hate WSS and SFD enough as it is without that. And remember that proposing stub types isn't policy - it's only a guideline. Grutness...wha? 01:21, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Hate WP:WSS? I think this one speaks for itself ... [6] Valentinian ^(talk) 06:27, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Logging

I have made a proposal to change the logging scheme of WP:SFD. Conscious 08:04, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

"What links here"

I notice that redirecting stub categories appears to be frowned upon here, but renaming categories and deleting the old ones leads to a large number of broken links throughout Wikipedia. As an alternative, can people please check the "What links here" before deleting the old category, and where appropriate modifying the links? Thanks. Road Wizard 23:26, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

I check for breaking links to templates, but I must admit, not generally in the case of categories. Are there large number of links to categories from the main namespace (as opposed from actual categorisation)? Or are you thinking more of links from wikiprojects, etc? (BTW, what-link-here also still works after category deletion, so it's not too late to make amends... Though admittedly I won't be able to for several days.) Alai 01:21, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

I hadn't realised that "what links here" still works for deleted pages, that is very useful to know, thanks. I was primarily thinking of links from wikiprojects and discussions. If a category has been deleted or moved because it wasn't proposed through the normal process, there is a good chance that the editors who are using it won't know to check with the stubs project when they find the category they have been working with turns into a red link. The category on the stub template gets changed during the process, but if the category name differs too greatly from the previous one, the editors won't recognise it. If people are checking the "What links here" as a matter of course when renaming stub categories, perhaps this should simply be a reminder to be a little more careful when doing so. Thanks. Road Wizard 06:32, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

I've always (I hope) used WhatLinksHere for both templates and categories. You'd be surprised the number of places that categories are linked to. Mainly it's various infoboxes and lists but there are certainly others. --TheParanoidOne 05:24, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for telling us. It seems like a lot of us check the templates but forget the categories. Valentinian ^(talk) 08:22, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

As a side issue, is there a template similar to Template:oldafdfull that can be used on the talk page of renamed stub categories to advise readers that the category was created through the SfD process and what the old name was? Road Wizard 06:32, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Not so far as I know there's not. Off the top of my head, I'd suggest either, being bold and creating one, or applying {{WPSS-cat}} in cases where the consensus of the discussion indicated that was appropriate. Alai 17:10, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

I think the WPSS one will do fine - it will advise editors to at least read up on the subject before taking corrective action. Is there somewhere other than here that I should propose the addition of the template to talk pages when moving categories? Road Wizard 18:04, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Old SfD templates

Having seen some comments about previously discussed items being reposted, I have decided to go ahead and draft a couple of templates similar to {{oldafdfull}}. Currently they can be found on my sanbox page. Like the oldafdfull template they would be used on the talk page to link to the closed discussion and summarise the result. I have created 2 templates, one for keeping and one for renaming, because the archives for each are stored separately. I would appreciate comments on whether you think this is a good idea, and if so any suggestions for improvements. Thanks. Road Wizard 22:09, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Looks good to me. Depending on what we ending up doing with the discussion-logging, the "votepage" parameter should probably be changed; ideally, it'd be combinated with the "date" parameter, to avoid having to specify essentially the same thing twice. Alai 23:47, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

If you or any other editors think you can improve them, please go ahead. I am still learning the intricacies of template creation and seeing the modifications that others make would be a useful learning experience. Thanks. Road Wizard 23:53, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

HELP!!!!

SFD has a severe backlog of cases that are ready to close, but need an admin to delete any stubs and templates. Caerwine Caerwhine 04:49, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Voting options niggles.

We should probably include some explicit voting options for renames: in particular, we don't seem to currently document the claimed default that (template) "rename" means "... and delete redirect". Also, I've just noticed that we say:

• Merge with xx-stub (Delete category, redirect template to xx-stub)

Personally I generally use (up)merge when I intend to suggest keeping separate templates, in the same category (i.e., these are conceptually distinct, we just have them in the same category for convenience) rather than a redirect (different typography or terminology for exactly the same thing). Am I off-base in my jargon? Alai 01:52, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

I agree on the first one (i.e., deleting the redirect) - but less so on the second one. For me "upmerge" simply means move the stubs into the parent category - whether the template's kept, redirected, or lost is a separate thing. Grutness...wha? 02:24, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Well, that's different from both my interpretation, and the current text, then! I sense a need for Yet More Jargon... Keep and recat template, perhaps? Alai 02:34, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Badly-named and undersized...

While my bot's now "street legal" and can run with a looser throttle, it'd still save a bit of renaming effort and server load if people populating a stub type on SFD cited as being both badly-named and undersized, if they were a tad bold and fixed the former, before addressing the latter; or at the least, created a redirect at the "correct" name. (I'm assuming the renaming is uncontroversial, and that existing usages won't be replaced until the discussion is closed.) Alai 18:25, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Implementing transclusion here

There was discussion here on going over to a transclusion-based method of listing and logging on this page (and on /P, which has been carried out without incident). Dicussion seems to have trailed off: unless there's further input, I'm including to call qui tacet consentire videtur on this, and implement the change starting from the beginning of next month. Alai 23:03, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Still think it would be better to do WSS/D first, which is a real mess and quite unmanageable for slow servers - but this one will probably need doing at some stage anyway. Grutness...wha? 00:06, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Aren't transclusions at the day level a bit too finely grained for this page? August 1st only has one entry on it! Overkill, I think. WP:WSS/P is done by month which I think is more than adequate for SFD. Also, single days makes it a pain to keep anything watchlisted. --TheParanoidOne 05:33, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

I definitely agree with TheParanoidOne. I was wondering why I wasn't seeing any changes to the SFD page. By day is definite overkill! By month is good enough. ~ Amalas rawr ^{=^_^=} 14:37, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

me too - daily transclusion on sfd isnt needed and makes it harder to keep track of whats beiong posted here with watchlists. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 04:33, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

By month is completely infeasible: the page is supposed to work on a time-frame of a week, and quickly gets to silly-sized if people aren't keeping up with the backlog, which is "frequently". Conscious did suggest per-week, which could be just-about-workable but is very course-grained for archival purposes, and "what's the current week number?" is much less intuitively obvious than working with dates. The whole point is, to do archival in a less painful manner than at present: monthly transclusion would be worse than useless for that purpose. Volunteers to do archival using the "old" system, i.e. cutting and pasting between two different pages, in two different orders, in two different header formats, front and centre -- I'm personally mighty sick of it, and judging by the rate at which it gets done, I'm not the only one. (My latest bout of logging was spurred on mainly by the thought of never having to do so again, after the next batch's done.) Alternatively some bright spark could set up automagic archiving of discussions marked as "closed". I do agree about the watchlisting issue; that's more than a little vexing. I've been trying to work out if there's a reasonable way to handle this via a "related changes" hack. Alai 06:41, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

By day is also completely infeasible, as seems to have been seen in the last week while I've been away. The original proposal you linked to talks at length about how by day is a bad idea - you seem to be the only one who supported it, Alai. I'd be quite happy with by week, which is what I thought you were suggesting with this proposal (since that was what the gist of the previous discussion seemed to suggest might be a reasonable compromise), but not by day, which is counterproductive (more work, less ability for watchlists to catch new entries, empty days, etc). If it was a choice between daily and no transclusion at all, I'd favour no transclusion at all. Grutness...wha? 23:54, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

I don't recognise that characterisation of the previous discussion (which was admittedly marked by much digression about transclusion of other pages, and missing the point about archival); and let's distinguish between "infeasible" and "produces carping after the fact". Daily transclusions are how just about every other *FD work, and do facilitate archival (or would, had we even gotten to a week yet), which is to what I was speaking to the "feasibility" of. For me that's both pretty strong proof-of-concept, and an indication of a "standard model" we should have a better reason to continue to resist adopting than historical inertia. "By week" would be fine in terms of typical volume of traffic, but means we: have to wait an entire week (for the first noms in a "batch") before doing any archiving at all; are further held up from doing so (again, for any and all) if there's even a single "problem" instance in that period (or else in either case, resort to c'n'p archiving, thereby completely defeating the purpose of transclusion); have to know what week-of-the-year we're working in at any given moment (which seems less than likely to go smoothly, given the less than 100% reliability of people even working to the correct month and date). I certainly don't want to immediately switch over to that without due consideration of the implications, on the basis of a couple of days reaction to daily pages (that itself getting as it did very little to-the-point input in advance, so I've inclined to suspect that we'd just get a fresh batch after such a further change). I'd like hear some specific counter-proposal that isn't implicitly based on the assumption of going back to frequently-backlogged c'n'p archiving, which "works" at all only on the basis that someone will eventually get sufficiently annoyed at or embarrassed by the backlog, as to start slogging through it bit by bit, performing the most inane editing tasks imaginable -- not just cutting and pasting (which is inefficient, low-tech and annoying enough), but manual editing of headers, and reversing the order of entries, which is pretty idiotic stuff to be having to do. Or if it is based on that assumption, does it explicitly, and explains how much of it they propose to do themselves. Alai 06:48, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

• After seeing the daily transclusion in place for a week or so, I have to say, it is actually very useful. I was worried about a massive watchlist, but I find that it remains pretty constant. Since we are now using {{sfd top}} and such to close the discussions, I just take the old pages off my watchlist. Hurray to Alai for a great solution! ~ Amalas rawr ^{=^_^=} 15:53, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
• OK - I'm prepared to eat a bit of humble pie - it looks like what I saw before may have been just teething... it does seem to work at this granularity. (It also has the added advantage of being able to edit two different sections simultaneously :) Grutness...wha? 23:57, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
• There was certainly the drawback of "change-over costs", when we were necessarily operating two systems at once, with the downsides of both (c'n'p logging of the old ones, and creating new pages for the new). I shall accept the hurrays gladly, however... Alai 05:34, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

over-keen stub deletion??

Hi --

I'm sorry to wade into something about which I know little, especially given that I've been deeply impressed by the wikipedia process as a whole. But for the second time in a very short period I've been involved in an overactive stub deletion campaign, and I think perhaps your heuristics for deleting stubs are not really one-size-fits-all.

The first one was for the artificial intelligence stub, which got saved even though I was apparently the first person to run into the message and it was more than 7 days after you guys set the flag up. The more recent one is computer vision, which is gone without a trace now when I had just achieved consensus with someone we should use it for an article they didn't think belonged in computer vision yet. Apparently it's been subsumed into computer science or something, which is fairly ridiculously broad.

I'm not sure that rules that work for train stations and tv shows work for science. You just can't expect pages that are mostly maintained by professionals to be policed weekly, or a fields articles to be wantonly expanded at some great rate. Esp. since these are geeky fields I think we are more likely to finish previous stubs than create new ones. yet at the same time, these busy people are precisely the ones who want precise stubbing, since they are less likely to wade through huge pages of stuff that they know little about.

I'm not sure that areas with relatively few authors / editors are always necessarily the ones least valuable for the wikipedia project.

Thanks for any attention --Jaibe 03:20, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, there are a few different points here... first, though stub deletion does use the WP:WSS guidelines to a large extent, there's no guarantee that they will be followed - there are often loud and numerous "keep" votes when ideally a particular stub type would be deleted.

As to why certain stub types such as computer vision are deleted, it is quite often because of the guidelies, especially those relating to either the ambiguity of the topic area or the number of currently existing stubs to use a particular stub category. For ease of both maintenance and editing, it is important that stub categories have a useful number of articles (usually deemed to be between about 50 and 500). Any more than that and it's difficult for the editor to wade through the items in the category looking for particular articles to edit. Any fewer, and there are the twin problems of having categories that are too small to be of editorial use (editors would either face having very few articles they could work on, or articles they know about being in a large number of finely defined categories), and also the problem of having so many different stub categories that it is very difficult to police them. With some 400,000 stubs, we already have around 2000 categories, even with the threshlds wused by WP:WSS. If these thresholds were lowered, the number of categories would increase reciprocally.

We don't give extra weighting to any one stub type over another - if a popular culture stub doesn't meet the standards, it will be nominated in exactly the same way as any science one that doesn't meet the standards. Furthermore quite a few of the members of WP:WSS are of a scientific bent themselves (I for one have an MSc in visual perception and have actually studied computer vision as part of my degree), and in any case if there is uncertainly about the worth of a stub type it is quite often the case that we seek guidance from any related WikiProjects.

The system may not be perfect, but we do our best :) Grutness...wha? 05:54, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

I believe I closed both of those, and "over-keen" is hardly the word: in the more recent case, it was deleted over a month after nomination, after being held open in the hopes of getting some meaningful input. Also bear in mind that it was never proposed: if "busy professionals" want their stuff to be there unattended months later, they'd be well advised to follow the creation guidelines in doing so in the first place. I think it goes without saying the "special pleading" for computer science topics as somehow suffering from "systematic bias" would go down like a lead balloon. Also bear in mind that deletions on size are without prejudice to later re-creation if more articles come along, or with a related by somewhat wider scope. I'd strongly suggest doing this later in the case of the computer-visions: find a reasonable number of articles for that, or for image processing, etc. It was, incidentally, rather hopelessly cripped as a stub type due to having no template, so every one of those articles would have to be individually "fixed", regardless. Alai 02:02, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

I totally agree that stubs (or anything else) shouldn't be created on the fly without paying attention to wikipedia institutions. The evolving/developed institutions are what make wikipedia great and both deserve and require respect. I still worry that the min. number of articles seems high, but do take your argument about 2,000 stub types. Though still, the point of wikipedia is scale, so maybe what's really needed is hierarchy like in usenet -- comp.ai, comp.vision ? that would create natural subsets for dividing policing duty, but still allow people to quickly find articles in their specialty to work on --Jaibe 21:42, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Stub types are indeed organised hierarchically, but it's still a concern that unduly small (sub)types will be neglected for the reasons I mention, as well as giving more and more stub types to "manage" centrally. We have the wikiproject proviso partly for "small but important" areas, since if there's a (real and active) wikiproject it in theory means that at least those people are "looking after" those articles. Alai 22:15, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

WP:Deletion process

I note that there's nothing about SFD on Wikipedia:Deletion process. Does anyone feel like adding something please? Grutness...wha? 01:08, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Military bios on CFD

Note that there's several stub cats tagged as part of this CFD. I've pointed out they're out of scope there, and striken them out (but left them tagged). I think it makes little sense to run the two in parallel: let's wait and see what they do there, and then run them through SFR accordingly. Or at least wait and see which way the wind is blowing... Alai 02:57, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

De-templatising/containerising emptied stub categories

It seems that the recent rash of delete-the-template, keep-the-cat nominations all started off with this discussion on /P. We should try and clarify and codify our thinking on this. We may have some categories that were expressly never designed to be more than containers, but under what circumstances should we consider turning a previously fully-formed stub type into one? When the template is (apparently) not seeing any use? When we think the template shouldn't be used any more? Whenever we feel like it? Some or all of the above? Alai 00:07, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

I think it makes perfect sense when we're breaking down a semi-arbitrary unit (like a continental or sub-continental region) into more specific sections like individual countries. It's a practice which has gone on here before with no problems, no complaints, and no fuss - remember {{Caucasus-geo-stub}}, for one? How about {{Yorkshire-geo-stub}}? The current nominations for deletion are simply continuing this long-held practice. Most casual stubbers look primarily at a country-level stub and if one isn't available they go for a very generic template like {{geo-stub}} or {{bio-stub}}. Keeping continent and subregion level templates around only adds one extra unnecessary level to the hierarchy, leaving one more level of category to check and one more load of clutter to an already over-full stub tree. And if the only people who generally use them are members of WP:WSS, then there's no reason whatsoever to keep them.

To answer your question in more general terms, we should look at standardising stub levels in the hierarchy and keep them rigid, but be prepared to change any levels above or below them. In the case of the geographical articles which are the basis for this query, the basic rigid levels would be the all-encompassing geo-stub, bio-stub, school-stub, road-stub, etc, and the equivalent at the individual country level. Anything above or below that is more flexible, so we can delete things like {{Caucasus-geo-stub}} (or {{Yorkshire-geo-stub}}, or {{UK-crown-geo-stub}}) when they have been completely split and we have no further need of them. As you have said yourself many times, the ideal situation would be for every country to have its own specific stub templates, even if they have to - for the time being - lead into continent-wide categories. Carry that thought one step further and you'll see that if that happened there would be no need whatsoever for there to be continent-specific stub templates, since everything could be stubbed with its individual country-stub. Grutness...wha? 00:56, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Shall I pencil you in as a "whenever we feel like it", then? (That was supposed to be the straw man option...)

I'm explicitly and expressly not talking about cases where we "retire" the whole stub type. If the category's getting deleted, we may or may not want to keep the template and redirect it someplace else, but that's a quite different issue from keeping a "container" category, and "deprecating in red" its template.

In the largely hypothetical case where a category has, from the time of its creation, a full set of mutually exclusive, completely covering upmerged templates, applied consisently in all similar cases then that would indeed be the ideal: people would have no 'false impulses' to use a non-ideal template. However, if we're going to "train" people to use more general stub templates, and then at some arbitrary point later "untrain" them to stop doing so, we're causing unnecessary cognitive overhead. (And I'm not excluding WSS members from "people" here: even if you have the geo-stubs memorised by heart, I'll bet you don't have all 2000-odd stub types as a whole down pat, which is what you're expecting of everyone if one extrapolates this practice.) And bear in mind the cross-contamination from other stub types with a similar structure: is the irony of creating one SouthAm- stub type, while deleting another as 'inobvious' and 'never going to be used' not fairly clear? Alai 01:19, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

No, it isn't. Especially when one is being used in a context where it can never be split into individual countries, such as with myth-stub, and the other is being used in a place where we've been telling people all along that country-specific stubs are likely to be the eventual outcome, as in geo-stubs and bio-stubs. If you're going to go down the road of "I want some exaples - but not those ones because they don't fit in with what I want", then what about Cat:Central Asia geography stubs and {{CAsia-geo-stub}} as an example? I repeat, there is no point in having an arbitrary level of hierarchy between two well-defined levels. If that's what you mean by "whenever we feel like it', then so be it - but it seems like a pretty rigorous rule to me - fixed levels are kept, arbitrary levels are only kept if the fixed sublevel is incomplete. Note too that it coincides with the other options you listed: When the template is (apparently) not seeing any use, and when we think the template shouldn't be used any more (By the way, using a 'straw man' argument isn't usually regarded as good or fair practice when you're looking for a non-rhetorical answer). And no, I don't have the whole structure "down pat". What I do is what anyone else would do - I try out the lower fixed level, and if that doesn't work I use the generic higher fixed level. If I don't think there's a lower level, I leave a higher level category. I don't know, for instance, how airports are split, so I try individual country-airport-stub and if it doesn't work I simply use airport-stub. I certainly don't stop to think whether a country counts as being in a specific subregion - I figure that someone else knows enough about the airport stubs that if it needs a refined sorting that will happen quickly enough. Grutness...wha? 01:47, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

It isn't what? I think I'm fairly well qualified to speak to what class of examples I'm addressing, and that would be, if I may quote myself from the top of this section, "delete-the-template, keep-the-cat". Had I meant, 'why and when do we ever delete whole stub types', I'm fairly sure that's what I'd have asked. And I didn't ask for examples at all, I asked for a principle. If we're going to get rid of a level of hierarchy as undesirable per se, why would we start by getting rid of the template (which doesn't correspond to hierarchy at all, but to facilitating sorting), but keeping the category (which embodies the "arbitrary level of hierarchy" precisely)? I'm not at all sure about "arbitrary subdivisions" as a basis for deletions of either sort, though: so far as I know, we're not in the process of creating any additional "Yorkshire" or "Sussex" stub types, but we're spinning out continent and subregion splits all the time. (Not that those are entirely consistent with each other, but that's another order of business.)

Creating a moving window of subregion tags that don't exist, exist for a while, and then don't exist again, out of phase from one hierarchy to the next is a recipe for confusion on a stick. If we're going to be creating types on a "planned obsolescence" basis, then firstly, I'd like to be let in on the plan, and secondly, we should be doing some actual planning. Specifically, we should be doing everything we can to allow and encourage tagging at the "fixed" level, and discouraging it at the "transient" one. For example the {{Stub Category}} boilerplate is predicated on the assumption of a single, explicitly-advertised template per category, which is inappropriate for such a model. I'm not sure we're not better off organising all countries by continent (or by UN region) and subregion on a permanent basis, but if we're not, we should make explicit provision to minimise double-takes. On sorting, that's roughly what I'd do too, though precisely what permutations I might try would vary according to what I thought was likely to exist, which might involve an "arbitrary" grouping before a "natural" or "fixed" one I suspect no-one is likely to have created, whether it's in principle a good idea or not; and it's not without its frustrations, which we should be endeavouring to minimise. Also bear in mind that what's "fixed" in one context may not be in another, since for example in some cases we split by modern countries, and in other cases we don't (or aren't sure whether we do, or should do, or not). Recent discussions on myths and ethnic group types spring to mind. (And I believe I said I listed a straw man option, rather than having employed a straw man argument, even if we ignore the fairly clearly facetious nature of that characterisation.) Alai 04:36, 30 August 2006 (UTC)