A stub is a placeholder indicator or marker for an unfinished article in a wiki.
Its purpose is to inform visitors that they've arrived at a very unfinished page (as opposed to a normal wiki page which simply never gets finished), and also to automatically classify the page to make it easier for contributors to find and fill out.
The other implication of a stub is that the editor who added the stub marker probably doesn't intend to fill out what they think is missing in the near future.
See
- Stubs category – a list of WoWWiki recommended stubs, their usage and lists of stubbed articles.
- How to find or fix a stub – For guidelines on how to fill in or work on a stub.
- Stub policy – General WoWWiki stub policy.
- Page editing policy – General WoWWiki editing policy.
- Writing policy – General WoWWiki writing policy.
Archived discussion from WoWWiki:Village pump
To Stub, or not to Stub?
What qualifies as a Stub? And how much information needs to be put into an entry to render it no longer a Stub? The reason I ask, I updated some of the missing links for bandage types today, and I see they're categorized as stubs. Which, thanks for the correction, but at what point is a short post on a brief subject no longer a stub? Case in point: a bandage. What I put in is a description of what skill is needed to make them, what skill is needed to use them, an image of the bandage's icon, and an image of the bandage's in game stats, as well as the calculation of how much DPS the bandage heals. I should have made those entries Stubs, clearly. But how much more information would be needed to make it unstubbed? Example: [Heavy Runecloth Bandage]
--Palehoof 15:29, 6 September 2006 (EDT)
- There's really no strict guidelines on it, other than simply if someone knows that there's more info that could go into the page (but doesn't know exactly what, or doesn't have the time to write it), they flag it as a stub. Obviously this creates a smallish problem for someone coming across a stub tag and can't think of anything else to add to the page.
- The reason for [Heavy Runecloth Bandage] getting stub tagged could be because of the tooltip being a screenshot (can't be indexed), and perhaps that the page layout is different from other item pages. It could also do with links to Allakhazam/Thottbot. See Boilerplate:Item. --Mikk (T) 16:09, 6 September 2006 (EDT)
- Palehoof, I guess I was the one that stubbed them new Bandages pages. As part of the New Pages Patrol group, I tag any new item pages which are not using the Boilerplate linked above as a stub. Basically any item page without all the tooltip info, text blocks and categories, gets flagged as a stub. I do the same with quests, but try to stay away from NPC/lore pages.--Dracomage 12:26, 7 September 2006 (EDT)
- That makes sense. I am now (gradually) learning to make the text boxes look all pretty. As you may notice here, I'm often better at crafting words into paragraphs than at crafting code into wiki entries. Thanks for the due process, all, and feel free to lambast me for noobery.
- --Palehoof 15:27, 7 September 2006 (EDT)
- As I always say to my guild members: "Be nice to new people, we were all n00bs at one time or another!" --Dracomage 16:05, 7 September 2006 (EDT)