Stub

Introduction

A stub is a very short article, generally of one paragraph or less. Most stubs fail to cover all but the most trivial subject completely.

A substub is, informally, an extremely short article, 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 stubs are legitimate and useful articles, sub-stubs can be considered otherwise, as they are sometimes confusing or misleading. They may therefore be deleted or expanded, depending on the situation.

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.

Stub alert!

If you create a stub, please add the following tag at the end: {{stub}} 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.

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. [This paragraph is itself a stub and should be expanded.]

Lists of stubs

To find a stub, use the following links (to see what links to this and similar pages):

What links to the Stub template

• Template:stub

By full-text search for the stub message

• {{stub}} with gentoo-wiki search http://www.gentoo-wiki.info/index.php?search={{stub}} (if search is unavailable, this won't work)
• "This article is a stub." with Google or Yahoo! site search services -- but make sure to put it in quotation marks to search for the exact phrase.

CSS

Depending on your CSS settings for class div.boilerplate#stub the stub message looks like this: