- This article is about underdeveloped articles on Halopedia.
A stub is a very short article, generally of one paragraph or less. Most stubs fail to cover all but the most trivial subjects completely. However, this does not mean the stub is not a legitimate article, it just needs to be expanded.
Some people take the idea even further and talk about "substubs", referring to extremely short articles that are 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 died in the United States." While most stubs are useful and have the potential to expand into better articles, substubs are sometimes confusing or misleading. Depending on the situation, it may be possible to expand substubs, but if the substub provides no definition or context, it may be a Candidate for Deletion.
The Wiki 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 Help:Preferences for help on this and other settings.
Stub alert!
If you create a stub, please add the following tag at the end, but before the Related Links and the External Links sections: {{stub}}. This will make the article display the following text from Template:stub:
- Stub This article is a stub. You can help Halopedia by expanding it.
It encourages other users to expand the article.
When you've added to the article, and it no longer looks like a stub, remove this message. Also put the following in your edit summary.
- [[Expanded article]]. Help Wikipedia by expanding stub articles.
This is to encourage people to expand more stubs.
Expanding stubs
To expand a stub, you can incorporate and cite references about the topic in books, magazines, or newspapers; visit external links, if any, within the article; or you can search Google or Yahoo! for information about the topic.
Lists of stubs
To find a stub, use the following lists (to see what links to this and similar pages):