Wikipedia: Find or fix a stub
From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.
- This article is about underdeveloped articles on Wikipedia. For other uses of the term stub, please see Stub (disambiguation).
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 Wikipedia 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 Help:Preferences for help on this and other settings.
| Ways to fix a page | |
|---|---|
| Topic specific guidelines | WikiProject - For guidelines on the format of everything from Saints to Mammals |
| Pages needing content work | To-do list - Per page lists of jobs to-do. |
| Peer review - For pages that are close to Featured Article status | |
| Requests for expansion | |
| Pages needing attention - For pages which need serious attention from someone familiar with their subject | |
| Cleanup - For pages that don't fit above | |
| Inaccurate or POV pages | Accuracy dispute |
| NPOV dispute | |
| Multiple pages on the same subject | Duplicate articles - To request that two or more pages be merged together. |
| One page on multiple subjects | Disambiguation - when "articles about two or more different topics have the same natural title". |
| Articles to be split - one article that should broken up into more because multiple topics are covered. | |
| Dictionary definitions | Things to be moved to Wiktionary - To request a page be moved to Wiktionary. |
| Non-English pages | Pages needing translation into English - To request attention to non-English content in the English Wikipedia. |
| Deletion | Deletion policy - To start the process of deleting a page |
| Copyright problems | Copyright problems - For pages which may violate copyright |
| Contents |
Stub alert!
If you create a stub, please add the following tag at the end, but before the See also and the External links sections: {{stub}} (See Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom messages for more information). This will make the article display the following text from Template:stub:
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. Also put the following in your edit summary.
- [[Expanded article]]. Help Wikipedia by expanding stub articles.
This is to encourage people to expand more stubs.
Expanding stubs
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.
Lists of stubs
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 || PBS stub
By full-text search for the stub message
- {{stub}} with wikipedia search http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search={{stub}} (If search is unavailable, this won't work.)
- "This article is a stub." with Google or Yahoo! site search service, but make sure to put it in quotation marks to search for the exact phrase.
- list of pages that link to the stub message here
Manual lists List of Pokémon Stubs
CSS
How the stub messages are displayed depends on the settings of the CSS selector #stub, see Stubs sorted by category.
See also Wikipedia:Stub and disambiguation message example.
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