Wikipedia:Stub

A stub is an article deemed too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject. The objective of this page is to provide a general guide for dealing with stubs.

The first section, Basic information, contains information that is recommended for most users. The second section, Creating stub types, contains more specialized material.

NOTE: This page is NOT for proposing new stub articles. To do that, please visit . Existing stub categories can be found at .

A stub is an article that, although providing some useful information, is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, 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, . The distinction between dictionary and encyclopedia articles is best expressed by the use–mention distinction:

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.

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. is frequently set to automatically remove stub tags from any article with more than 500 words.

There is no set size at which an article stops being a stub. 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 judgement (the user essay on the Croughton-London rule may be of use when trying to judge whether an article is a stub). 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.

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