I have noticed that by piping through articles, most are of a reasonable length. But when I use the random page button, I often find a stub. I have sought to investigate this.
To get a better idea of Halopedia's contents, I clicked the random page button 100 times. I am not certain of its reliability, but I assume here that each page is weighted equally. Because each page has had a 1 in 57 chance of being selected, there may have been duplicates, but that's a minor effect. I ignored disambiguation pages. Here are my results:
- 56 of the pages I found are less than 1 good paragraph long. By good paragraph, I mean one about as long as the first one in this section. An article from this section is either one short paragraph or a few isolated sentences, possibly with partially completed infoboxes. Few good editors would argue that these articles are not stubs.
- 28 of the pages I found are short for their topic. This includes articles that are at least 1 good paragraph long, but too short to have a good structure. This category is somewhat more subjective.
- 15 of the pages I have found are of the right length. They have good structure and cover good detail. The only edits that seriously need to be made to these articles are information updates and quality checks.
- 1 of the pages I have found is too long and sprawling. This is the article on Unggoy. It needs to be structured by creating subpages.
As you can see, the majority of articles are too short to be considered good.
Two trends I noticed of the extremely short articles:
Some of these articles are very similar, such as action figures. A sysop (I believe Subtank but may be wrong) has addressed the issue of action figures in particular. These, I propose, are best combined into a larger article with individual sections.
Some articles describe certain things seen on levels. These should become sections of articles on the locations of the levels. For example, toilet should become a section of Crow's Nest (Base), or possibly on a new subpage "Crow's Nest (Base)/Features" for all such features.
The remaining stubs should be handled as appropriate.
To handle Unggoy and other sprawling articles, I believe it is best to find what aspects of Unggoy are essential to the article but can be set on subpages. Combat, for instance, occupies three major sections of the page; I propose to replace the three sections with a summary of combat and a link to the new subpage Unggoy/Gameplay. After all, it's thanks to the subpage Unggoy/Quotes that the page does not contain a sprawling list of dialogue observed in-game.
Halopedia has 5678 articles as of when I write. I think, based on my results, that all Halopedians can get this to under 3000 without removing any information or creating more sprawling articles. It's up to us to make the obscure information more visible and to organize Halopedia's articles.