STOWiki:Policy/Stub

STOWiki Policies
Policy status and phases
Admin selection policy Category policy Copyright policy Deletion policy DNP Policy Editing policy External links Naming policy – Personal articles – Player character pages	Neutrality policy Stub policy Three revert rule Vandalism policy Voting policy Writing policy – Fan fiction – Fleet pages – Items – Starships – Lore
See also: Guidelines Administrators

This page is an official policy on STOWiki.

This policy has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow.

Feel free to propose any changes to this policy, but please make sure that changes you make follow the official process and reflect consensus on the discussion page before you put them into practice. Any big changes need to be Adopted or Decreed to be enforced as policy.
See Project:Policies for an overview of STOWiki policies.
See Category:Policies for a list of proposed and adopted policy articles.
Shortcut: STOW: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 {{Stub}} tag can be used at the top of pages, as well as inside sections of the page.