Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub improvement

What is a stub?

A stub is any article that has only basic information while omitting important aspects of the topic. There is no exact size that defines a stub, but most articles under 250–300 words will be considered stubs. Articles with more than 500 words are almost never stubs. Stubs are often tagged with a stub template at the bottom of the article; when the article is expanded, this template should be removed. Articles may also be classified as stubs on talk page banners, and these banners should be updated as well.

For Stub-class articles, editors may decide that an article:

1. With more than ten sentences is too big to be a stub,
2. Or that the threshold for another article may be 250 words.
3. Others follow the Did you know? standard of 1,500 characters in the main text, which is usually around 300 words.

Article size tool:

To activate the Prose size tool: Click on Preferences; Gadgets; Browsing; tick "On" at Prosesize: add a toolbox link to show the size of and number of words in a page.

Within the article:

1. Click on "Page size" at the toolbar.
2. Look for below line & check length > 1,500...

For Example: Prose size (text only): 316 B (46 words) "readable prose size"

Articles with few words can be tagged as stub. See WikiProject Stub sorting for details about appropriate stub tag assignment.

The stub template ({{Article-example-stub}}) automatically adds the article into a stub-category. For an article with an explicit category link ([[Category:Article example stubs]]), that link is not needed, and should be removed if present. For a list of stub-Template articles, run Query94073 for all categories whose name ends in "stubs" that currently contain at least one mainspace page that's not in Category:All stub articles. (Created by Cryptic) The articles listed contain Category-stubs to be removed.

How to participate

Participating is simple:

1. Pick a stub.
2. Find one or more reliable sources about that topic.
3. Summarize those sources in the article.
4. Once it's no longer a stub, list it as a success at The 50,000 Destubbing Challenge (optional).

• Wikipedia:Database reports/Long stubs, a daily bot-generated report of long articles with stub tag.
  • If the WP:STUBLENGTH requirement is not met, add the stub to Category:Long stubs with short prose.
  • Run the Rater article assessment tool and update WikiProject Class and Importance as needed. Note: the ORES class prediction displayed percent is a confidence estimate. Especially for lower confidence values, the rating may not be accurate, so use your best judgment for WikiProject Class.
  • If the article is no longer considered a stub, edit the article and remove any {{stub}} templates using the edit summary: rm stub; [[Wikipedia:Database reports/Long stubs]]; [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub improvement]]; [[WP:STIM|you can help!]]
  • At Category:Long stubs with short prose, there's a Petscan which lists articles largest size first. For these large articles, if the WP:STUBLENGTH requirement is met, this category and the stub tag may be removed. Also, check the article's Talk to change Stub-status there.

ForStub-class articles, here is a PetScan example to create a smaller group of articles from a large category.

Depth: 1
Categories: Stub-Class football in France articles  (Note: over 8,000 articles)

Page properties:

Namespaces - add Talk
Size - Smaller or equal - 100 ( Results = 247 )
Redirects - No, No, No

Output: HTML or Plain text
Sort: by title

Since the Stub class is set on the article's Talk page, review each article for a missing stub tag (to add) if needed; or if the article is improved, remove the stub tag and upgrade to class "Start" or higher.