SmashWiki talk:Stub

Haha! How nice, that the page for stub is a stub. However, it certainly shouldn't stay that way. I think that, on this page, we should establish policy regarding where the stub tag should be used. It would, for instance, be wasteful to throw the stub tag on every Smasher article. There are a million of them, they're all short, and there really isn't much to say about each Peach player in Missouri. Other articles, however, really do need expansion (the Super Smash Bros. Melee article used to be this way). --MaskedMarth 15:56, December 14, 2006 (GMT)

I agree with this entirely. I would not have expanded the Super Smash Bros. Melee article had it been buried by a slew of random player listings. Basically, I believe a ruleset for stubs should say something similar to "If an article has not reached the needed depth of discussion for the subject, and you believe it can be adequately expanded into something which does, mark the article as a stub. This, however, does not mean that any short article is a stub. For example, player articles can provide all of the necessary information about a player in a few sentences; these articles do not need to be expanded. Likewise, a 3 line article for the Super Smash Bros. Melee article would not adequately cover the depth of the issue, and should be marked as a stub if it appears as such." However, I am new to wiki-editing and don't feel comfortable meta-editing, so I won't write this quote to the main page. If anyone else feels it is sufficient, go ahead and put it up.--Aperson 19:05, December 14, 2006 (GMT)

Edited. It's poorly written, but the main problem is I don't think my guidelines for what are stubs are clear, or smart. --MaskedMarth 00:56, December 17, 2006 (GMT)

Oops, trouble is that I didn't see this policy until now because everything's a little scattered. Creating a page of links to important policies would be good if it hasn't already been done (if so, it seems I can't find it either!). I don't really see a problem with stub tags on smasher articles. If there isn't enough information about the player's role in the Smash community to warrant at least a smasher table, player background and some links to document said activity, odds are it lacks the noteworthiness necessary to justfiy any article at all. As I've been slowly working through the articles in Category:Smashers, I've found that for the vast majority of the articles, you can usually run a search on SmashBoards or the internet in general to dig up enough information to have a decent article. Once the key information is presented in the article, then the stub tag could be removed.

But hey, if you don't want any stubs in smasher articles at all, that's fine too. Or maybe just put stubs on those articles that still need standardization like HoChiMinhTrail, while removing stubs from articles that are formatted nicely, but still don't have a great deal of information, like Arash. This would help sort out which stubs truly do need the most attention. -- Randall00 15:41, February 23, 2007 (GMT)

Defining Stubs...redux

"Crew and Smasher articles: a minor, regional-level player (such as Aftermath) should never be tagged a stub, because SmashWiki just has too many short Smasher articles."

Okay, so now that I've sat and observed the goings-on for quite awhile now, this policy doesn't make sense to me anymore. The fact that SmashWiki "just has too many short smasher articles" isn't a reason for not tagging them as stubs. First, you have to consider why we're tagging stubs in the first place as well as what other benefits it offers. Of course, at face value it offers the standard wikified benefit of indicating to the reader that the article provides only fragmented information and entices those knowledgeable on the subject to expand upon it. However, it also categorizes the whole thing into Category:Stubs, or (even better) Category:Smasher stubs. I'm not sure what principle we're trying to enforce here, but if the only reason for not including stub tags is so we don't clutter up Category pages, I gotta say...that's the opposite of what we ultimately want to do.

See, by introducing smasher stub templates into small, piddly articles that probably have little or no bearing on the smash community at large, we are effectively sorting through the articles that will eventually get deleted. It provides us (or "me" or "someone else with initiative") with a list to work with, complete with convenient links to both the useful smasher stubs that need expanding (like Ultra Luigi and Thunders), as well as the ones that should be outright deleted (like Cappin' Wings and PALO DA SUFFOCATER and PPS).

I guess the main problem I have with it is that I just can't see any good reason for omitting it. The purpose of a stub stag is to indicate to the reader that this article does not necessarily provide the rudimentary information on the subject. When it comes to smasher articles, yes you're right, sometimes there isn't exactly a lot of information available, but that's no reason to withhold that fact. This way, at least the reader knows there isn't much info available. The English Wikipedia says that a stub is an article containing only a few sentences of text which is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, but not so short as to provide no useful information. This is how I prefer to think about smasher stubs: All articles begin as stubs, but you have to treat each one differently and use some discretion and attention to detail when looking at them and to do so, I've found that there are a few distinct "types" of stubs:

First, the fixer-uppers...

• Depressed_Brian

The Depressed Brian stub is a shining example of how an article can look clean and professional at face value, but reads as though it were written by a 10 year-old (and in some cases, they are!). Usually these articles are written by clever adolescent youth who understand basic programming and wiki code enough to manipulate Template:smasherbeta and add bullet points and links where they belong, etc, etc. The Depressed Brian stub is an example of good initiative and precisely the pro-community sort of attitude we need, however the author is working on a purely WYSIWYG basis and it results in a lot of cleanup from copyediting freaks like myself.

There's not much to do to make a Depressed Brian into a much nicer article. Step 1 is to take the existing information and re-word it into something encyclopedic. I can't explain how to do that and it seems like there's an awful lot of people who just simply aren't capable of commanding the English language in that way, otherwise it would've been written more formally to begin with.

Step 2 is to remove the useless trivia. Since most smasher articles are written by the smasher themselves, we are FLOODED with self-gratifying and pointless pieces of trivia, not to mention needless inside jokes and lists of nicknames that are way out of line for an encyclopedia article. Believe me, we don't need to hear about how "sexually active" a 15 year-old smasher is or how "he only plays cheap characters" or how he "also plays a level 70 Paladin on Kel'Thuzad" or how "he used to be a Mario main, then he switched back to Marth, decided he didn't like it and then switched to Luigi, only to return back to Mario three weeks later." It is NOT worthwhile information.

Other than that, the article is pretty much done. Like I said, the formatting and the wiki code is all in place on these types of stubs; the original Depressed_Brian even has external links to SWF profiles and were it cleaned up, I would have no problem removing that stub tag.

Other Depressed Brians:

• • Lonejedi
  • Linkje
  • Kriz
  • [[Bias]
  • MaMa
  • BHLMRO <-Possibly the most epic Depressed Brian travesty of them all...

tee hee...--Janitor 22:46, May 24, 2007 (GMT)

---

• GoldenGlove

A GoldenGlove stub is basically a list of statistics with no reference to external sources and no way of verifying what any of the stats mean either in or out of context. GoldenGloves need more work than most stubs because typically they contain things like tournament placings, power rankings, crew win-loss records, etc. However, you run into the same problem where the readers seem to think that a wiki is just free webspace to store their data as tournaments progress.

One big problem with GoldenGlove stubs is that they can't really be marked for deletion. We have to assume that the authors aren't just fabricating tournament standings. Odds are, they probably did play in tournaments and probably did have some impact on the smash community, no matter how small. However, they don't provide any information about the tournaments themselves or the local smash scene, so these sorts of things need to be incorporated into articles where the subject is not sufficiently covered elsewhere. Most smashers at least provide their place of residence, at which point you can do some detective work at SmashBoards to dig up more information (that's how I wrote CAOTIC and AngelCX, despite knowing nothing about them beforehand) but that is a very tiresome process if you have nothing better to do and I won't hold it against anyone for not going back to clean up everyone else's mess. That said, however, I do reserve the right to hold it against someone for creating a GoldenGlove-esque article without doing it properly in the first place. Especially if you're reading this.

This particular example also has a whole section devoted to GoldenGlove#Characters.....

Look, I know how everyone in the world just loves to tell other people what characters they play, who they don't play, who's yer second best, what characters work well for me on FD, blah blah blah. I want to know who your main character is and if you happened to play another character notably (such as MagnuM), sure throw that in there, too. But if you are sitting there listing your top 17 competitive characters trying to decide if Ganondorf should be moved from rank 13 to rank 12, save yourself some time; the fact is: nobody cares. At the same time, nobody cares if you've "recently picked up Pichu" or "plays a mean Zelda but hasn't user her in tournaments yet" or "plans to attend 0C3 using only Roy and Mewtwo." Unless you're Ken, nobody cares; and even then, there's plenty of people who don't care.

Other GoldenGloves:

• • Oddeven2002
  • [[Schweppes]
  • Sephiroth27 <- This gentleman invented the u-throw to u-smash combo...
  • Radiance
  • [[Get That Rat]
  • Vietgamer1021

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• [[Budgie]

A Budgie is an article stub that is essentially the same as a GoldenGlove except in addition to providing sketchy statistics and informal information, it also violates the rational policy of not allowing signature images from banners/crew banners, etc. The original [Budgie]] itself has two gaudy and useless images placed in the article.

Other Budgies:

• • [[Len]
  • [[Munchy]
  • Pretty much all of [[The Slashers]
  • Spiderman

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Now, the deletion candidates!

• [[Mr.Snuzzle]

A Mr.Snuzzle is an article that is so incredibly small and void of content that you might as well delete it. Basically, if you can re-write the entire article in less time than it takes to delete, there's no reason to have it cluttering up space. If someone decides to come by and re-create the article, then we can mark it as a stub and work on expanding it, but until then, I think a lot of these Mr.Snuzzles are never going to get read again.

Other Mr.Snuzzles:

• • DancingQueen90
  • [[E14]
  • [[Muave-Rupee]
  • [[Raid]
  • [[NoDickNick]
  • [[vexed69]
  • [[Shogun] <- A pristine example of a Mr.Snuzzle; a smasher who doesn't smash much...

---

• [[Chopingboard]

The aptly named Chopingboard stub is ripe for deletion. Quite often, these articles are written by people who came on to SmashWiki once, made their own article and left never to return, thinking of it as just another personal profile to fill out...another cyber-hydrant upon which to leave their mark. These articles contain blatantly false information, are usually designed to get a laugh out of someone and usually fail miserably.

Other Chopingboards:

• • [[thegamer200519]
  • [[Little greg] <- Truly the ultimate Chopingboard...and the one that I am most hesitant to delete...

Now, I know the first mass deletion process hasn't occurred yet, but we may as well start thinking about it now. As more content gets added, more trash will have to be filtered out or else this will turn into one of the bajillion other wikis that turned into an impossible database of incomprehensible spam. Obviously, not all GoldenGloves will get expanded upon and not all Chopingboards will be deleted, either, so if you happened to be the author of any of the above articles, please take no offense. I'm viewing the articles as a neutral observer and just because I think it ought to be deleted doesn't mean that there's something about it that I don't know that would warrant its keeping.

It seems like we're either very scared to delete articles or the majority of our sysops are either too busy with other SWF responsibilities and/or too busy to appoint a larger SmashWiki staff. Without some administrative footing in the content, SmashWiki really is nothing more than free webspace for our massive member list to fill up with whatever they want. I don't know about you, but I don't think anyone should be contributing an article like SA2Jeff in the first place, but people do and they have been sitting on the server since their inception, setting bad examples for future editors. Yes, people should know better, but unfortunately, one of the problems with maintaining communities and drafting policies is that although people should know better, they don't, and that's the reality.

Uhh....comment, I guess? -- Randall00 ^Talk 21:19, May 24, 2007 (GMT)

Hehe, forgot that I even wrote this. In any case, it looks like I'm the only one doing serious community-related editing anyway. :^) -- Randall00 ^Talk 16:43, July 6, 2007 (EDT)

Deleted

I say we get rid of all the tiny little articles about all the small Multi-Man Melee, and merge all the relevant information into the Multi-Man Melee article. Then we can delete all the Multi-Man Melee stubs. I have done the first part of this plan to the first 4 articles. Could someone else assist?--Oxico 12:49, December 13, 2007 (EST)

How in the world did I miss all the edits here?

I'm a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad back-ender :(

Anyways, this needs merging with SmashWiki:Stubs and then I'll revise the new article to meet the excellent standards laid out in this talk page. Let me check the templates to see whether I should merge the other article here or vice versa... – MaskedMarth ^{(t c)} 12:02, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

What now?

I did the math, and almost 11% of our mainspace articles are tagged as stubs (218/1987). Over 25% of our smasher articles are tagged as stubs as well (332/1292). We need to make a major effort here to improve the quality of articles that are currently stubs, decide there's nothing more to improve, or else delete them. (Also, I recommend reading the previous comments on this page. Despite their age, there's some truth there.) Miles (talk) 14:54, 7 November 2010 (EST)

So how many have noticed

That there are now 700 of these? RoyboyX Talk 22:32, 21 November 2013 (EST)

*Raises hand I think anybody who went to the recent changes can find that out. :P Dots (talk) The Goldeneye 01:10, 22 November 2013 (EST)