Wikibooks talk:Templates/Stubs

Guidelines for Stub Subcategories
Going through the main stub category, and starting to roll some of them off into seperate stub categories, I feel the need to start a discussion on some guidelines for using these. Right now, I can see two main issues that need to be resolved.

Naming of Stub Subcategories
Currently, the naming is all over the place. There are 3 conventions curretly in use: Kernigh suggested in IRC that the first type has the potential to clutter namespaces, and recommends the third convention:
 * 1) Category:Bookname:Stub(s)
 * 2) Category:Bookname Stub(s)
 * 3) Category:Bookname/Stub(s)

[21 March 17:00:48] Kernigh: I usually call my templates [21 March 17:01:02] Kernigh: In the past, I used, but then I decided that was confusing with namespaces. [21 March 17:01:14] Kernigh: For example, would not be in the Template namespace.

It also fits in nicely with current general category convention (to use Category:Typeofmodule/Subcategory) and keeps things clean.

There's no need to rush and change old categories, but this is something I'd like to see a general consensus on before I go and clean up Category:Stubs.

Creation of Subcategories
There's also the question of how many stubs are necessary before a subcategory is necessary. I don't expect any strict guideline or policy to come out of this section, because it's a highly subjective and situation-specific matter: A larger, but non-complete book with only one stub/sectionstub might still warrant a category due to possible future expansion of the book. Something like the Cookbook may require classes of stubs: Recipe Stubs, Ingredient Stubs, and so on. Smaller books might need to be classified by bookshelf or general subject areas, such as smaller How-To books.

In any case, I'd like to receive some feedback on this before I begin the process of cleaning up Category:Stubs. (It should also be noted that some of the modules in there are about to go up for a VFD as soon as I get the necessary links organised.) Xerol Oplan 00:21, 22 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm hoping that we can clean up some of these stubs before they get out of control! I guess this is a sign that Wikibooks is growing, that this sort of question even has to be raised.  Most of this IMHO is something that should be in the hands of the participants of each Wikibook, being considered as a seperate Wikiproject (as it would be traditionally defined on Wikipedia for a group of such pages).  The stub organization is something to help those authors try to coordinate their efforts and try to do general cleanup.  My writing style is that I tend to work on just one module at a time and then move on, but not everybody seems to work that way, nor is it in the nature of some of the Wikibooks either.  Some books simply seem to be just a maze of hundreds of stubs, because it is easy to add some initial details, but harder to really work out each module completely.


 * Categories can have hundreds or even thousands of pages in them, so the only point of "sub cats" in this regard is to help break up the groupings of stubs into smaller amounts that are more easily dealt with, aka for individual Wikibooks or similar themes like Computer Programming books. If a particular group of editors wants to create a subcat for their Wikibook but only has one stub, I say go for it.  On the other hand I think it would be more useful if there were at least 10-30 stubs before "outsiders" really went in and explicitly created new sub-cats.  I don't know how subjective that seems, but it is something to consider.  For sub-cats of a particular Wikibook, that should be something explicitly done by major contributors to that Wikibook.


 * You might also want to consider breaking up stubs by bookshelf. That is at least a level of organization here on Wikibooks that makes sense, and something that can be tied directly to the bookshelf page as well.  --Rob Horning 00:59, 22 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Good idea. As the stubs category has only gotten larger, and will cotinue to do so, would anyone mind if I divide the stub category into bookshelves? --haginძaz 02:38, 24 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't mind at all, that's probably a good idea, considering that every single book has the potential to include a stub category. I'm going to go through, and rename most of the stub subcategories that i've created to use the "Category:Bookname/Stubs" format, because that makes the most sense. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:46, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I went through Category:Stubs, and fixed all the subcategories that I am associated with, to use the "forward slash" convention, as noted here. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 22:59, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Stub Deletion Policy
I think the time has come for some serious discussion take place over the status of stubs here on Wikibooks. The unofficial policy up until now has been to keep stubs, under the philosophy that at some point in the future somebody will come along and hate the stub so much that they will try to rework the content and turn it into a real Wikibook. This policy seems to have been very useful on Wikipedia, but the circumstances on Wikibooks are a little bit different.

One issue here is to even determine what exactly is a stub. One or two sentances or a short paragraph is a reasonable use of the term, as is a page full of red links with at most one or two "sub pages" that have been started, each of which is only a paragraph in length. Obviously other stub definitions can be added as well.

And this is a Wikibook stub by using this definition. Module stubs within a specific Wikibook that is otherwise under active development should be a completely seperate issue, and have its own page culling guidelines.

If stubs violate WB:WIN in terms of the likely direction of completed content, current policies cover what should happen with them and a VfD is certainly useful. For other modules, this is where the discussion really needs to go. Should a stub be able to languish on Wikibooks for several years (as a couple have already) or should there be a reasonable period of time (I'm talking years here, not weeks) that a Wikibook should be worked on or be deleted?

Under no condition should modules or Wikibooks stubs be deleted that have been recently created. This is not showing good faith to whomever is trying to develop the content, and there may be a group collaboration effort going on that an administrator may not be aware of. Any other thoughts? --Rob Horning 13:05, 22 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree that the problem is in defining a stub; just from looking through Category:Stubs it seems that some of these might've gone up for a speedy delete, depending on who saw the module first. (Specifically looking at the cases of 68.73.54.217, there's another issue at hand there, but this is a case I'm currently preparing to bring up on VfD.) Some of the stubs in the root may have been intended as being brought up as submodules of a book, but due to bad link preparation weren't linked as such, so checking the incoming links could help, and the stub could probably be moved to a subpage of the main book and recategorised as a stub under that book.


 * Another problem is the misuse of the templates; I found at least five cases where sectstub should have been used, but stub was used instead. This makes the stubs category (along with stubs that are part of a larger book) look a lot larger than it actually should be. I also found a couple that were marked as stubs, but are actually TOCs to books, some of which had a lot of well-filled modules. So it really needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis, but I think a lot of these modules might be up for deletion anyway, simply for being "sub-stubs". Xerol Oplan 21:31, 22 March 2006 (UTC)


 * In the past, everyone always used stub. It was not until my redesign of 30 November 2005 when sectstub added pages to a category. Even after that, because current books use stub much more often, some editors know not of sectstub. --Kernigh 20:30, 25 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm not convined that every three-sentence stub should be discussed at VfD in order to be deleted. I think that stubs containing no useful content (like "this is a part of XYZ book", "second law of thermodynamics will be explained here", "see also: [link] [link] [link]") should be speedy deleted. New stubs having some content should be kept but old ones (about two years old) having only table of contents with red links should be massively submitted to VfD. Stubs that should be specially targetted are those which do not explain what they should contain (like Energy Efficiency). --Derbeth talk 16:31, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Categories on this page...
Why is this page put into so many categories? -- SB_Johnny | talk 16:07, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
 * It's a side-effect of displaying the stub templates (which place the page they're used on into a category) on the page, in the same way Template messages/Deletion appears on Category:Candidates for speedy deletion, because the template is used on the page. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Xerol (talk • contribs).