STOWiki:Policy/Stub

A stub on the STO Wiki is defined as a very short article of one paragraph or less. Generally, stub articles are short, vague sentences (or even a single sentence) that fail to cover all but the extreme basics of a subject.

Stubs can be useful as placeholders; if you are in the process of researching a topic or are writing a longer article for inclusion in the wiki, it can be a good idea to start with a short article and grow from there. However, stubs are also sometimes left in the database, and thus are of very little use to those who read them.

Before creating a stub article, ask yourself if it might be useful to anyone. Sometimes it is better to have no article at all than to have one that completely fails to describe even the basic facts about a subject. After creating a stub article, don't just leave the article in the database. Try to return after a while to expand the article if no one else did in the meantime.

The policy
Please note the following:
 * Do not mark empty pages as stubs (or create a page which is a stub but has absolutely no content; e.g., a page of article management templates and empty sections). Stubs are for expanding info currently present, not a method for removing red (broken) links.
 * Do not stub pages that cannot feasibly be expanded in the near future. If no more information exists, it's not a stub.
 * When creating a stub article, use the template stub at the top of the stub article page to show other contributors that this article needs to be expanded.

Marking a page as a stub
This template adds the article to a stub category so that they can be tracked down later for further addition and expansion.

The  tag can be used at the top of pages, as well as inside sections of the page.