MTG Wiki:WikiProject Potential stubs

MTG Wiki is nearly 20 years old and actively maintained, collecting several hundred edits per day. Edits tend to be focused on current topics (recent sets, events, and mechanics), or the fine details of the deep lore. We skew heavily towards Vorthos, and if there's anything a Vorthos hates, it's forgotten knowledge...

Despite the activity, there are many articles on the wiki that are extremely short. For some of those, this is at least partially a consequence of a lack of inbound links to bring in attention. We don't have any orphaned pages right now, but "more than zero links" is not a high standard.

This project proposes using a bot to perform a finite number of passes across the wiki, flagging short articles for human attention. The initial pass will flag less than 500 articles. Future passes will be determined by the amount of editor interest, and are contingent upon finding consensus that the first pass led to sufficient improvement. At the upper end of possible outcomes, if this project proves very popular, it might turn into a recurring intermittent event, perhaps seasonally.

Bot activities

The bot will check every article in the Main namespace. It will ignore disambiguation pages and subpages.

When it finds an article with fewer than 100 words, it will add {{Potential stub}} to the top of that article, which will add the article to a hidden maintenance category of the same name. Hidden categories are not visible to visitors merely reading the articles in question; the category must be browsed to directly.

If this project needs to be terminated at any point before its completion, the same bot can sweep through and remove any template tags discussed here.

Human activities

Human editors participating in this project can start at Potential stubs. Consider the article and decide what improvements, if any, might be appropriate. No article ever requires a navbox, infobox, or images, and those elements have no bearing on whether an article is a stub. Do not add them merely to meet some notion of standardization.

Some possible scenarios:

• An article might be for a non-notable subject. Such articles can be merged into an article about an appropriate broader subject, or simply deleted if none exists.
• A short article that comprehensively covers its subject, but is unlikely to ever be expanded, can usually be merged into a broader article.
• A short article that comprehensively covers its subject, and might plausibly expand in the future, is not a stub. It is merely a short article. Replace {{Potential stub}} with {{nobots}} to indicate that the page should be ignored by bots.
• A short article that is not yet comprehensive is a true stub. Either expand the article yourself, or replace {{Potential stub}} with {{Stub}} to draw the attention of other editors.
• The bot might flag pages that are not stubs because they are not traditional articles. Any such pages should be documented here on the Talk page so that they can be excluded from future passes.

Editors may also want to flag an article with {{Delete}}, {{Merge_to}}, or {{Merge from}}.

Why not just use the Short pages report?

MediaWiki includes a report of every content page on the wiki, in ascending order of size. The bot will be marking articles that appear on the first pages of that report, which begets the question: why bother with the bot? Why not simply encourage editors to address the shortest pages first?

The project aims to improve the same pool of potentially weak pages, but in a structured manner. By using tracking categories, editors participating in the effort gain a more visible measure of progress. The short pages report will always contain every page on the wiki, but the automated Potential stubs category will shrink as work is performed. Additionally, some short pages are already at an appropriate length, and the short pages report lacks the capacity to identify them.