The Stub Week event (plus the Write-A-Thon and the Core Topics initiative overall) helped me step out of just being a behind the scenes administrative type and getting into writing–and whether or not I continue to write stubs in the future (my developing articles so far well exceed one liners), the point is that getting started has encouraged me to keep going. Whether or not this becomes an established initiative, or something that happens on an occasional basis, I think it works. It gets the shy ones started. While my studies are specialised, my interests are broader, but with so many ‘experts’ around I’ve been hesitant to jump in and write about topics of which I have a strong interest but no applicable qualification. Having started, though, I feel a bit better about just diving in.

Also, the checklist makes it easy to keep track of stubs on related topics, so if someone decides to work on improving a stub and then finds that they also have information in their references that can help build on another stub within that topic group, then that could help overall growth of subject content …

Anyway, as an ‘incrementalist’, I say it’s a goer, and thanks for the initiative–it was really encouraging.

I really do believe we are poised to grow explosively. Even if we continue to accelerate at a slower rate than we have this year, we’ll still be growing exponentially and can expect to have tens of thousands of articles in two years, hundreds of thousands in several years, and over a million in 5-10 years. When we have that number of articles, we will also have proportionally more participants, and the greater the number of participants, the greater the likelihood that what are stubs now will be expanded.

Many Wikipedia articles that are now extremely long and meaty started out as stubs. In fact, it is very hard to find a stub now on Wikipedia about any important topic. That is certainly one Wikipedia success story they are not to be begrudged.