User:GK/Systemic bias in stubs?

==Systemic bias in stubs? A proposal for handling multiple stubs==

After thinking about it for a couple of days, I've started to wonder if the way that I have been handling Japanese literature stubs (labeling most stubs as a japan-stub, but a very few of the more "important" topics as both a japan-stub and a lit-stub) is the right way to go. Doing it that way is sort of like saying the minor Japanese literature articles are not really literature (even though I've seen the most trivial English-language fancruft marked as lit-stubs. At the same time that doing things that way may be a symptom of an unintentional systemic bias, it may also overemphasize the inherent Englishness of the Wikipedia by making the literature stubs category mostly English-language topics.

I now think that it may be much better to label all literature stubs as lit-stubs on their main page, and then add a geographic stub, such as the japan-stub, on the talk page when it is appropriate. Doing it this way would allow persons who are interested in literature in general to see the non-English-language literature stubs (and might get them interested in tackling a topic outside of their special interests) but still have the same articles listed in the Japanese stubs category (where, quite honestly, the people most likely to update and fix the stubbiness of an article will probably be looking).

Another example of this unintential bias in the Wikipedia is when I changed a bunch of the stub labels for Japanese TV stations and TV networks from the old {{msg:stub}} to japan-stubs. If I had labeled them as station-stubs, the articles might be easier to find for those people who have added nice infoboxes to many of the current station-stubs and would help give the Japanese TV station articles the same look-and-feel as the British and American station articles.

So my proposal is that most stubs and substubs should be converted to some general subject stub on their main page, and a geographic stub, when appropriate, should be added to the talk page. Also: for any articles currently labeled with a geographic stub that are not primarily about that geographic region in some way, the geographic stub should be moved to the talk page, and a more general subject stub added to the main page. gK ¿? 21:59, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)