Talk:Sedacthy

Stub

The recent additions to this article bring up an interesting point, and one which has occurred a number of times on the wiki. Although all of the information added to the article is well-sourced and well-written, they are only short, unconnected blurbs that don't really compose a whole article. My opinion is that these individual facts are better suited for inclusion on a sandbox page, rather than in the main wiki. A stub article is generally two or three sentences that give you a brief general overview of a creature. Once it grows beyond this, and starts incorporating more detailed information, I believe it should be created as a full article.

How do others feel about this? --brandingopportunity 17:40, January 1, 2010 (UTC)

I'm conflicted on the topic. I think that an ideal article has a logical layout and flows as well as would any other encyclopedic article. But not everyone has the time or talent to write that sort of piece and we shouldn't discount the contributions of those who can help us get information into the project from various sources. In this particular instance, the sentences in question can be rephrased and combined in a way that makes them more concise while not eliminating the specificity of their citations. I don't think that moving useful information from a main article to a sandbox is helpful, though, as it means that someone searching or navigating the site will find less information on the topic within the main namespace. —yoda8myhead 17:56, January 1, 2010 (UTC)

I see your point, Yoda. It's just a fine line to walk between useful and non-useful. I agree that we should keep useful information. --brandingopportunity 19:12, January 1, 2010 (UTC)

I think I understand where you're coming from here. When I actually write articles I have a text file that I fill up with "facts", and it looks a lot like this article, and I also know that some folks do the same thing using sandbox pages. That said, I also think that "something is better than nothing". I'm therefore OK with pages like this one. I think it should probably have a {{WIP}} or {{cleanup}} (as appropriate), but a list of well-sourced facts is better than a stub (IMHO). —aeakett 03:13, January 3, 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, lets keep them, with a {{cleanup}} that way a new chronicler can see what a more experienced chronicler can do with the facts that they found. I also do the notes thing, but I copy/paste the info into a word document, get the facts into paragraphs, and then rewrite it into the actual article. Right now for the slavery article I have almost 2 pages of notes... some of them might not make it into the final version (or may need to be asked about- such as a list of creatures/races that are mentioned in the text as slave owners) And I still have about 20 resources to go through... I especially see articles like this as useful when we KNOW that a new source is going to come soon, as we KNOW there's a Sahuagin NPC in the NPC guide, or from someone who only has a small number of books and knows there is most likly more information out there. as much as it looks incomplete, its less resources the next chronicler will need to read through to write the full article. sorry for the useless rambling -- Cpt kirstov 03:29, January 4, 2010 (UTC)

In addition to {{Cleanup}} and {{WIP}}, there's also the new {{Update}} template I added that we can use to denote articles that we know a new source is coming out on. For example, the River Kingdoms article can probably use it, since there will be Guide to the River Kingdoms sometime this month and then six adventures all set there. For the purposes of "fact" articles (vs organized paragraph articles), I think {{Cleanup}} works fine. We might also put links to the categories that include articles transcluding these utility templates in the sidebar or more prominently on the main page/community portal so that editors can find a list of pages that need to be organized or rewritten. — yoda8myhead 06:44, January 4, 2010 (UTC)

Re: putting links to articles that need updating, cleanup, or whatever on the main page... I think this is a great idea. Checking those categories should probably be something that we do as admins anyway. —aeakett 17:56, January 4, 2010 (UTC)