 | This user subpage is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. If you want to revive discussion regarding the subject, you might try contacting the user in question or seeking broader input via a forum such as the village pump. This page is out of date, but is useful for historical purposes about the extent of stubs. |
With Wikipedia crossing one million articles in early 2006, I asked a simple question: what proportion of those articles are stubs? I couldn't find any page on Wikipedia that included this information, so I tallied some statistics myself. The following information is based on the December 13, 2005 database dump. I'll try to update it when Wikipedia hits a million articles.
Note that for these statistics, I only considered an article a stub if it contained the text 'stub}}' in a context other than 'section-stub}}'. Many extremely complete articles (e.g. George W. Bush) have section stubs, but I wouldn't call the articles stubs.
Stubs were introduced en masse around the start of 2004. Since then, they have formed an increasingly large proportion of Wikipedia articles.
Though the rate of increase has lessened since 2004, stubs still comprise an increasingly large percentage of the articles on Wikipedia. The fact that over 35% of articles are stubs reinforces the fact that Wikipedia is growing extremely rapidly, and emphasizes the need to focus on stub expansion, not just article creation.