Talk:Archive:Monthly Write-a-Thon/May 7, 2008

How short is too short for a stub? Can I write a latin phrase used in medicine and give 2 or 3 sentences about it, then give the british and english pronunciation? Then link articles relating to this? Tom Kelly 09:33, 31 July 2007 (CDT)

I can't find it to save my life now, but I believe when I signed up I read something about keeping stubs to a minimum of about 150 words. --Todd Coles 09:52, 31 July 2007 (CDT)

Well, strictly speaking, anything under 50 words is deletable. That doesn't mean anything over 50 words is OK, though. As a rule of thumb, I would say 150-250 is a good minimum, depending on the topic, but it could perhaps be even less. See this for very relevant discussion. (That might be what you saw, Todd.) Generally, we want a stub to contain a good definition at the very least, as well as some other solid information, and the whole thing should more or less stand alone. You might also see The perfect stub article, which I wrote back in the early days of Wikipedia. Note that we don't identify stubs as stubs on articles, on CZ. That's a practice I've come to think is ultimately harmful. --Larry Sanger 09:57, 31 July 2007 (CDT)

I guess a good follow-up question to this would be - Is it preferable that we make shorter "stub" type articles for the Write-a-thon in order to open more avenues for collaboration? Or should we stick to larger, more complete articles? --Todd Coles 15:09, 31 July 2007 (CDT)

Write-a-thon Template

I figured that if we're going to do this on a monthly basis, we ought to have a template that we can use to quickly place the notice in the main page.

Write-a-Thon! Tomorrow -- from Wednesday, August 1st to {{{3}}} we invite all Citizens to come to the wiki, start a new article, and edit somebody else's new article. It's a Write-a-Thon! It'll be a wiki-whoopie, a cyber-social, a collaborative kegger!

It needs some TLC though, if someone could help, that would be great. Thanks! --Paul Derry 14:25, 31 July 2007 (CDT)