LabVIEW Wiki:Stub

This article provides a general guide for dealing with stubs.

Definition

A stub is an article containing only a few sentences of text which is too short to provide proper 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 wikification. With these articles, a wikify template is usually added instead of a stub template. Note that small articles with little valuable information or with no inherent notability may end up being nominated for deletion or be merged into another relevant article.

Ideal stub article

See also: LabVIEW Wiki:Manual of Style.

Any registered user 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 usually end up being speedily 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.

Begin by defining or describing your topic. Avoid fallacies of definition. Write clearly and informatively.

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

Categorizing articles as stubs

After writing a short article, or finding an unmarked stub, you should insert a stub template see Template:stub. 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. Stub templates are transcluded not substituted.

All you basically need to do is simply add {{stub}}. LabVIEW Wiki does not yet have categories of stubs. The more accurately an article is tagged, however, the less work it is for other sorters later, and the more useful it is for editors looking for articles to expand. You can also add the stub article to a category if you feel comfortable with this.

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. Many articles still marked as stubs have in fact been expanded beyond what is regarded as stub size. Be bold in removing stub tags that are clearly no longer applicable.

Locating stubs

• Category: Stubs the main list of stubs
• Special:Shortpages
• By setting stub threshold in Preferences to a maximum number of bytes for a page to be placed in class "stub" for markup purposes.