Category:Article stubs

A stub is an article deemed too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject. This page provides a general guide for dealing with stubs: the first section, Basic information, contains information that is recommended for most users; and the second section, Creating stub types, contains more specialized material.

Basic information
A stub is an article that, although providing some useful information, lacks the breadth of coverage expected from an encyclopedia, and that is capable of expansion. Non-article pages, such as disambiguation pages, lists, categories, templates, talk pages, and redirects, are not regarded as stubs.

If a stub has little verifiable information, or if its subject has no apparent notability, it may be deleted or be merged into another relevant article.

While a "definition" may be enough to qualify an article as a stub, Wikipedia is not a dictionary. The distinction between dictionary and encyclopedia articles is best expressed by the use–mention distinction:


 * A dictionary article is about a word or phrase and will often have several different definitions for it
 * An encyclopedia article is about the subject denoted by the title but usually has only one definition (or in some cases, several definitions that are largely the same) but there may be several equivalent words (synonyms) or phrases for it.

Sizable articles are usually not considered stubs, even if they have significant problems or are noticeably incomplete. With these larger articles, a cleanup template is usually added instead of a stub template.

How big is too big?
Over the years, different editors have followed different rules of thumb to help them decide when an article is likely to be a stub. Editors may decide that an article with more than ten sentences is too big to be a stub, or that the threshold for another article may be 250 words. Others follow the Did you know? standard of 1,500 characters in the main text.

Creating and improving a stub article
A stub should contain enough information for other editors to expand upon it. The key is to provide adequate context—articles with little or no context usually end up being speedily deleted. Your initial research may be done either through books or reliable websites. You may also contribute knowledge acquired from other sources, but it is useful to conduct some research beforehand to ensure that your facts are accurate and unbiased. Use your own words: directly copying other sources without giving them credit is plagiarism, and may in some cases be a violation of copyright.

Begin by defining or describing your topic. Avoid fallacies of definition. Write clearly and informatively. State 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.

Next, try to expand upon this basic definition. Internally link relevant words, so that users unfamiliar with the subject can understand what you have written. Avoid linking words needlessly; instead, consider which words may require further definition for a casual reader to understand the article.

Lastly, a critical step: add sources for the information you have put into the stub; see citing sources for information on how to do so in Wikipedia.

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