dKosopedia:Stub
From dKosopedia
Stubs are articles which have not yet received substantial attention. They have been created, but don't yet contain enough information to be truthfully considered articles. The community believes that stubs are far from worthless. They are, rather, the first step articles take on their course to becoming complete. The objective of this article is to provide a general guide for dealing with stubs.
Identifying a stub
A stub is an article which is clearly too short, but not so short as to be useless. In general, it must be long enough to at least define the article's title. This usually means 3 to 10 short sentences. Note that a longer article may be a stub if the topic is complex enough; conversely, a short article on a topic which has a very narrow scope may not be a stub. Sizable articles which lack wikification, copy editing or contain errors are generally not considered stubs, and the normal procedure is for the {{msg:cleanup}} tag to be added to them, instead (see what links here). When you create a stub, or come across an un-marked stub, please consider adding the {{msg:stub}} tag to it. This is what the tag looks like.
Note that small articles with little information may end up being nominated for deletion.
Ideal stub article
When you write a stub article, it is important to bear in mind that its main interest is to be expanded, and as such it ideally contains enough information to give a basis for other editors to expand upon. Your initial research may be done either through books or through a reliable search engine such as Yahoo! or Google. You may also contribute with knowledge you have acquired from other sources, but it is useful to conduct a small amount of research beforehand, in order to make sure that your version of the facts is correct.
Begin by giving a definition or description of the topic in question. Avoid fallacies of definition. Since at times definitions are impossible, you should write a clear and informative description of the subject. State, for example, what a person is famous for, where a place is located and what it is known for, the basic details of an event and when it happened.
Next, you should try to expand this basic definition. The previously mentioned research methods will often fetch you enough information for you to be able to expose the basic points of the subject. Once you have a couple of well-structured and well-written sentences, you should internally link relevant words, so that users unfamiliar with the specifics of a subject can understand what is written on the article. Avoid linking words needlessly; in case you are in doubt, you should use the preview button and try reading the article from the point of view of somebody who has had no exposure to information regarding the subject. If no word seems hard to comprehend or relevant to the article, simply don't link anything.
Once you have submitted the article, there are a number of courses it may take. An editor might get interested in it and develop it further, or you could expand it yourself once you have found more information about the subject or once you have more free time on your hands.
Locating pages that need work
A good place to start contributing is where-ever there are links to stubs. Meta Stubs lists the current stubs; You can find out what links to each stub with the links provided.
Also, there's a good chance that these articles need expansion:
- List of pages linked to a stub
- List of short pages
- List of articles that other editors are linking to but don't exist yet
- List of pages that exist but need clean up
Articles that link to the special pages listed here may have facts that are out of date. It's very helpful if you have the resources to research and update articles like this.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Wikipedia:Stub". Unless this article is re-written from scratch it must include this citation (See Wikipedia:Copyrights).
