AHWiki:Stub

A list of pages marked as stubs can be found here.

Basic information

A stub is an article containing only a few sentences of text which is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, but not so short as to provide no useful information. While a "definition" may be enough to qualify an article as a stub, AHWiki is not a dictionary. If little other information is ever likely to be added, and the topic is a common Aces High term, the entry should be added to the Common terms article.

Ideal stub article

Any registered editor may start a stub article.

When you write a stub, bear in mind that it should contain enough information for other editors to expand upon it. The key is to provide adequate context — articles with little or no context may eventually be deleted. Your initial research may be done either through books or reliable websites. You may also contribute knowledge acquired from other sources, but it is useful to conduct some research beforehand, in order to ensure that your facts are accurate and unbiased. Use your own words: directly copying other sources is plagiarism, and may in some cases be a violation of copyright.

Begin by defining or describing your topic. Avoid fallacies of definition. Write clearly and informatively. State, for example, what a person is famous for, where a place is located and what it is known for, or the basic details of an event and when it happened.

Next, try to expand upon this basic definition. Internally link relevant words, so that users unfamiliar with the subject can understand what you have written. Avoid linking words needlessly; instead, consider which words may require further definition for a casual reader to understand the article. Lastly, a critical step: add sources for the information you have put into the stub; see citing sources for information on how to do so in Wikipedia.

Once you create and save the article, other editors will also be able to enhance it.

How to mark an article as a stub

After writing a short article, or finding an unmarked stub, you should insert a stub template. As with all templates, stub templates are added by simply placing the name of the template in the text between double pairs of curly brackets (e.g., {{stub}}). The {{stub}} code should be placed at either the beginning or end of an article, with a double space or horizontal line separating it from the rest of the content.

Removing stub status

Once a stub has been properly expanded and becomes a larger article, any editor may remove its stub template. No Administrator action or formal permission is needed.