Taijitu:Stub

A stub is an article containing only a few sentences of text which is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, but not so short as to provide no useful information. Sizable articles are usually not considered stubs, even if they lack proper formatting. Such articles should have the {{expand}} template added to them instead.

Ideal stub article

When you write a stub, bear in mind that it should contain enough information for other editors to expand upon it. The key is to provide adequate context. Begin by defining or describing your topic. Write clearly and informatively. State, for example, what a person is famous for, where a place is located and what it is known for, or the basic details of an event and when it happened. Once you create and save the article, other editors will also be able to enhance it.

Categorizing stubs

After writing a short article, or finding an unmarked stub, you should insert a stub template. By convention this is placed at the end of the article, after any navigation templates and the category tags, so that the stub category will appear last. It is usually desirable to leave two blank lines between the first stub template and whatever precedes it. Stub templates are transcluded onto the article.

Stub templates have two parts: a short message noting the stub's topic and encouraging editors to expand it, and a category link, which places the article in a stub category alongside other stubs on the same topic. The naming for stub templates usually topic-stub; a list of these templates may be found here. You need not learn all the templates — even simply adding {{stub}} helps. The more accurately an article is tagged, however, the less work it is for other editors later.

Removing stub status

Once a stub has been properly expanded and becomes a larger article, any editor may remove its stub template.

Many articles still marked as stubs have in fact been expanded beyond what is regarded as stub size. If an article is too large to be considered a stub but still needs expansion, replace the stub template with an {{expand}} template (no article should contain both a stub template and an expand template).

Locating stubs

• Category: Stub categories the main list of stub categories and of articles contained within them
• Category: Stubs Miscellaneous Stubs
• Special:Shortpages