Expanding

=How to Expand a Stub= 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 sub-stub 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, depending on the situation.

The wikimd 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, or Preferences for help on this and other settings.

For lists of stubs, see the section below on lists of stubs. See also these helpful pages:
 * Page size || The perfect stub || wikimd:Requests for page expansion || wikimd:Topical index

Stub alert!
If you create a stub, please add the following tag at the end:   (See wikimd:MediaWiki custom messages for more information). This will make the article display the following text from Template:stub:



and thus encourage other users to expand the article.

When you've added to the article, and it no longer looks like a stub, remove this message.

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

Automated: Most wanted stubs || Stubs w/o stub-msg || Shortpages

By what links to special stub pages: MediaWiki:stub || Wp:ff/stub || Tolkien stub

By full-text search for the stub message
 *   with wikimd search http://www.wikimd.org/w/wiki.phtml?search= (if search is unavailable, this won't work)
 * "This article is a stub." with Google or Yahoo! site search services
 * list of pages that link to the stub message here