MaxTravelz:Outline articles

From MaxTravelz

An outline article is a status rating for any article in MaxTravelz that has template sections but still does not address its subject sufficiently to be very useful for other travellers.

In general, outline articles are incomplete articles. Subjects worth having an article about are usually worth having at least a paragraph written about each of the standard template sections. If only some of the sections of a standard template are filled, then the subject is not covered fully or it may not merit its own article and should be incorporated into another one. See What is an article? for details on what deserves its own article on MaxTravelz.

Of course, length doesn't guarantee completeness or even usability. An article about a destination can go on for pages and pages and still not give the enough information you need to survive there. Each article should cover its subject with the appropriate depth or breadth. But if you do not know how to get there, or where to stay if you do, then the article is not very useful. Such an article would still be an "outline", even though it has a lot of content.

Contents 1 Pros and cons of outlines 2 Detection 3 Practical outline-making 4 Taking out outline disclaimers

Pros and cons of outlines

Outlines have their bad sides. Readers can get confused by too many empty sections. Is that all there is to say about the article? Is that the expected length of articles for MaxTravelz? Where's all the info? Outlines can give a bad first impression if people haven't seen other MaxTravelz articles. (But see below for a way to make outlines less confusing.)

Mostly, though, outlines are a good thing. An outline is the framework that allows an article that started its life as a stub to grow and evolve into a full blown article. One MaxTravelzler can start with a tiny one sentence stub and turn into an introductory paragraph with a bare outline, and other MaxTravelzlers will come along and add more information to it. Someone else comes in and reformats the article according to the Manual of style, and someone else adds photos. Eventually, the tiny one-sentence stub becomes a healthy, useful article.

Detection

If you set the Threshold for stub display value to something other than 0 in your preferences, links to short articles will be shown in a different color than links to complete articles or to non-existent articles. The threshold value is a number of characters in the article; somewhere around 500 characters should give you a good idea of whether an article is long enough or not. (The basic template alone is around 150 characters.)

Note that this only shows short articles, and so it's a rough approximation of an outline. Some articles may need additional information, even if they stretch for hundreds of thousands of characters. We don't have the software yet to decide if an article covers its subject well, so have to manually add an MaxTravelz:Article status disclaimer.

Practical outline-making

If you add template sections to an article that doesn't have them, or see one that someone else has made, it's good to add a little disclaimer that says that the article isn't done yet. It gives a bit of extra impetus to readers to add what they know to an article. There's special markup in our software to mark something as a stub. It looks like this:

{{outline}}

...which makes this appear on the page:

This article is an outline and needs more content. It has a template, but there is very little information present. Please plunge forward and help it grow!

You can add the outline message at the bottom of the page. This reassures readers that we know the article is not complete, and that it's not indicative of the overall quality expected out of MaxTravelz articles. Also, it invites them to add whatever they can to make the article better.

Best of all, other MaxTravelzlers can use the What links here feature on the MaxTravelz:Outline articles needing development page to check for new outlines needing attention -- although it'd be preferable if you did that when you first detected the outline.

It can help very much if you copy the appropriate article template to any stub article. For example, if the stub is for a region of a country, copy over the region article template. People are more comfortable if they can add just a little information at a time, rather than writing the whole article from scratch.

Taking out outline disclaimers

It can be hard to tell when an article is no longer just an outline. An article doesn't have to be perfect to take the outline disclaimer out of the article -- just relatively complete. Would the article be useful if someone was trying to visit the city or country it covers? Can you get there? Can you sleep there? Then it's probably not an outline any more, and the disclaimer can be changed to be a usable article.