Talk: Rockefeller Thaylor

His species is not given. It is suggested that he was not human. – AT2Howell 14:35, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry to say, your comment is a bit vague -- Could you describe how it was "suggested"? He has a Human sounding name. -- Captain MKB 14:40, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, his father named him Rockefeller because they were now living on Earth. Sorry, it's been a couple of months. I'm working on the cookbook now. Tried reading The Left Hand of Destiny because it seemed well documented (I wouldn't need to take notes). That proved to be a bad choice as many of the bits in the book didn't make it to the wiki. – AT2Howell 15:11, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure -- maybe you could pull out a book you've already read and start expanding some of these short articles? -- Captain MKB 15:48, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

The book just says he was a short, bald man with a furry butler. Honestly, I care about these entries just as much as I put into the article. If someone else cares more, they're welcome to add. The point is, at least I started the article. Before that, there was nothing. – AT2Howell 03:07, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

I apologize about that -- I edited the comment -- it is now phrased as a simple constructive suggestion without the snippy tone.

The thing I need you to realize is, that in some cases, it would be better to leave an article blank than to create a short article -- so "at least I started it" is not a constructive attitude. If you start a short article with only 5 to 10 words in it, you might have just let it wait until someone saw that it was still a "red link" and filled it out further -- the point is that, unwritten articles are color coded so that people will add info to them, but by creating a very short article, you are defeating the purpose of the color code on the links. We have hundreds of stubs that need to be worked on, creating more and never going back to expand any of them is not helpful to the database.

For example, why haven't you added any of your knowledge to the article? It doesn't say anything about his height or his butler -- but you just added the info here. Why not add it to the article? -- Captain MKB 13:23, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Here's the thing, I hadn't read anything Star Trek in the last 10 years. When I transfered to shore duty, I found myself with lots of time on my hands. I then started reading the small cache of Star Trek books that I had collected. Completely lost, I turned to this resource for information. What started to irritate me, was that some books had lots and lots of red (or nothing at all). I found that short articles helped more than nothing. I figure that if you're going to read it, you might as well take notes. That doesn't mean I want to spend months researching minor characters, but a little info goes a long way. – AT2Howell 15:24, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, the red links are designed to show that an article is needed -- by taking away the red link, you actually lower the probability that someone who IS researching minor characters will work on it... while creating a stub does help to expand the database, it is only helpful if it is descriptive -- for example, if you put an incomplete sentence, you are creating an article that does not have enough information to be a stub. As a rule of thumb, I would try toi write more than one sentence, even if you are only contributing a stub. Add links. Add categories. By not following this advice, you are making articles that actually confuse the database, not help it. We've pointed this out before -- if you aren't in posession of enough info to fill out two complete English sentences, we'd prefer you do not create the article -- but DO go ahead and add the info to other cross index articles here. For example, if I see a ship article that I don't have enough information to fill out, I will add it to lists of ship articles, rather than creating an article that is simply too short to be useful to anyone. -- Captain MKB 18:21, 18 April 2008 (UTC)