| Shortcut: WP:STUB |
A stub is a very short article, generally of one paragraph or less. Most stubs fail to cover all but the most trivial subjects completely. However, this does not mean the stub is not a legitimate article - it just needs to be expanded.
Some people take the idea even further and talk about "substubs", referring to extremely short articles that are shorter even than most dictionary entries. The term implies the information in the stub is insufficient or hard to interpret, e.g., "An airplane is a flying machine with wings," or "Douglas Adams was a famous author who has died in the United States". While most stubs are useful and have the potential to expand into better articles, substubs are sometimes confusing or misleading. Depending on the situation, it may be possible to expand substubs, but if the substub provides no definition or context, it may be a candidate for speedy deletion.
The Ireland Information Guide software can display links to stubs differently if you set the Threshold for stub display higher than 0, for example 200 to mark articles shorter than 200 characters. This makes it easy to find/fix (add content to) a stub. See Special:Preferences to set your threshold, or Preferences for help on this and other settings.
| Resources for maintenance and collaboration | |
|---|---|
| Requests | new articles - fix stubs - article expansion - topic list |
| Cleanup | general - specific - blank pages - move to Wiktionary |
| Help wanted | peer review - translation into En - images |
| Controversy | neutrality - article accuracy - statement accuracy - copyvios |
| Stubs | "perfect" - stubs - substubs - short pages - incomplete lists - most wanted - stub cats |
| Disambig | articles to be merged - split |
| Deletion | speedy - articles - categories - redirects - templates - jokes - log - archives - undeletion |
| To-do lists | articles - projects - books |
| Table of contents |
If you create a stub, please add the following tag at the end: {{stub}} (See Ireland Information Guide:MediaWiki custom messages for more information). This will make the article display the following text from Template:stub:
This article is a stub. You can help Ireland Information Guide by clicking on the "edit" tab above, and expanding it. Go to the home page of Ireland Information Guide for more details on "how to edit a page".
It encourages other users to expand the article.
When you've added to the article, and it no longer looks like a stub, remove this message.
To expand a stub, you can incorporate and cite references about the topic in books, magazines, or newspapers; visit external links, if any, within the article; or you can search Google or Yahoo! for information about the topic. [This paragraph is a stub and should be expanded.]
To find a stub, use the following lists (to see what links to this and similar pages):
Automated: All stubs || Most wanted stubs || Stubs w/o stub-msg || Shortpages || Shortest articles by character count
By what links to special stub pages: Template:stub || Wp:ff/stub || Tolkien stub
By full-text search for the stub message
Manual lists List of Pokémon Stubs
How the stub messages are displayed depends on the settings of css selector #stub, see Stubs sorted by category.
See also Ireland Information Guide:Stub and disambiguation message example.