Help:Stub
From PermaWiki
An article too short to provide more than rudimentary information about a subject should be marked as a stub by adding a stub template to the end of the article. Anyone can edit a stub article, or remove a stub template from an article which is no longer a stub.
The objective of this article is to provide a general guide for dealing with stubs.
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. Sizable articles are usually not considered stubs, even if they lack appropriate formatting or copy editing. With these articles, a cleanup template is usually added instead of a stub template.
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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. 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. 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.
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. By convention this is placed at the end of the article, after the External links section, any navigation templates, and the category tags, so that the stub category will appear last. It is usually desirable to leave two blank lines between the first stub template and whatever precedes it. 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 ({{stub}}).
Removing stub status
Once a stub has been properly expanded and becomes a larger article, any editor may remove its stub template.
If an article is too large to be considered a stub but still needs expansion, replace the stub template with an {{expand}} template (no article should contain both a stub template and an expand template).
Be bold in removing stub tags that are clearly no longer applicable.
