wikishia:Stub

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.

How big is too big?

There is no consensus on the length of an article to be counted as stub. Different editors may followed different rules of thumb to help them decide when an article is likely to be a stub. One criteria may be an article with less than 500 characters.

While very short articles are very likely to be stubs, there are some subjects about which very little can be written. Conversely, there are subjects about which a lot could be written, and their articles may still be stubs even if they are a few paragraphs long. As such, it is impossible to state whether an article is a stub based solely on its length, and any decision on the article has to come down to an editor's best judgment.

Similarly, stub status usually depends on the length of prose text alone: Lists, templates, images, and other such peripheral parts of an article are usually not considered when judging whether an article is a stub.

How to mark an article as a stub

After writing a short article, or finding an unmarked stub, you should insert a stub template. Choose from among the templates listed at wikishia:stub/stub types, or just use the generic {{stub}}, which others can sort later. Stubs should never be manually added to stub categories — always use a template.

The stub template is placed at the end of the article, after the External links section, any navigation templates, and the category tags, so that the stub category will appear after all article content. Leave two blank lines between the first stub template and whatever precedes it. As with all templates, stub templates are added by simply placing the name of the template in the text between double pairs of curly brackets (e.g., {{wikishia-stub}}).

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 is usually topic-stub; a list of these templates may be found here. You need not learn all the templates—even simply adding {{stub}} helps (see this essay for more information). The more accurately an article is tagged, however, the less work it is for other sorters later, and the more useful it is for editors looking for articles to expand.