User:Taak/peeves

adjectival versus parenthetical disambiguation

I have trouble thinking of cases where it is more readable to use parenthetical disambiguation rather than to use an adjective. Is hedge (linguistics) more readable than linguistic hedge? Computer science heuristic versus heuristic (computer science)? With the parenthetical form, you almost always have to use a | to rename the link, while with the adjective form this isn't necessary as often. Plus, you can use the ]]s style plural formatting with adjectival disambiguation. Is there any reason to use the parenthetical form?

Self-handicapping

Overuse of stub notices

I can't remember how many times a I've seen a full, five-paragraph half-page article with a thorough references section marked as a stub. Or, even for short articles, there are plenty of subjects in a real encyclopedia that would receive just one paragraph's treatment. These are not stub articles as long as all the basic information is present and factually accurate.

The result of this inclination is tens of thousands of stub pages, Category:stub is so huge it doesn't even load and it's completely impracticable.

Overuse of minor edits

Minor edits are supposed to be used only for grammar or spelling errors or very minor wording changes. Some people mark almost all their edits as minor, or all their talk: additions as minor.

Underuse of stub pages

Some people think stub pages are "bad", such as the author(s) of m:Kill the Stub Pages.

The argument goes like: Stub pages are bad, because they don't "signal" to authors via the red-colored link that an article needs to be written.

Such reasoning is based entirely on the flimsy assumption that people are more likely to write a complete, high-quality article from scratch than to expand on a stub. From my personal experience, this assumption is very questionable — someone with the inclination and a copy of the database could do some research and get some a posteriori data about this.