Wikivoyage:Stub articles

A stub article is any article in Wikivoyage that doesn't have a proper template or outline with standard Wikivoyage section headers (e.g. Get in, Eat, Drink, Sleep). Without even places to put this information, it probably doesn't have very much of it, and is of no use to a traveller at its current status. Stubs are usually created by people who are new to Wikivoyage and don't know about templates or how to add them; they just add some information to a blank page, which is certainly a good first step.

If an article is worth writing about on Wikivoyage, it will usually fit one of the skeleton templates. If a template is inserted and one or two of its sections are filled out – even just the opening paragraph explaining what and where this destination is (e.g. "Hobbiton is a village in the Shire."), then it is time to move it to outline status.

See also: Outline articles, Usable articles, Guide articles, Star articles.

Pros and cons of stubs

Stubs have their bad sides. Readers can get confused by a too-short article: Is that all there is to say about the subject? Is that the expected length of articles for Wikivoyage? Where's all the info? Stubs can give a bad first impression if people haven't seen other Wikivoyage articles. (But see below for a way to make stubs less confusing.)

Identification

If you set the Threshold for stub display value to something other than 0 in your preferences, links to stubbish articles will be shown in a different color from links to complete articles or to non-existent articles. The threshold value is a number of characters in the article; somewhere around 500 characters should give you a good idea of whether an article is long enough or not.

Note that this only shows short articles, and so it's a very rough approximation of stubbiness. Some articles may need additional information, even if they stretch for hundreds of thousands of characters. We don't have the software yet to decide if an article covers its subject well.

What to do with them

If you create a stub article, consider whether it does any good before you hit "publish". In nearly all cases, you should add the appropriate article template (for travel topic articles: create a reasonable disposition) and make sure that the page contains at least some useful information.

If you see a stub article that someone else has made, upgrade it, tag it, or (if it is worthless and seems abandoned) delete it or mark it for deletion.

Upgrade

If the article seems viable, copy the appropriate article skeleton to the stub article, and incorporate the existing nuggets of information into the appropriate section(s). For example, if the stub is for a region of a national park, copy over the park article template. The quickest way to do this is to type {{subst:region skeleton}} into the article, save the page, then continue editing to fix the intro paragraph and place the existing information in the right section(s). Other common templates you can include using {{subst:____}} are: smallcity skeleton (for anything from a village with a couple motels and some sights to a typical city), bigcity skeleton (for major travel destinations), district skeleton (for sections of a bigcity), or rural area skeleton (for rural areas without a dominating city).

People are more comfortable if they can add just a little information at a time, rather than writing the whole article from scratch, and a template like this makes it much easier to do that. And once you've properly added a template, the article is no longer a stub. The disclaimer can be changed to an {{outline}} or (if it contains enough information) something even higher.

Tag

If the article isn't going to be improved right away, it's good to add a little disclaimer that admits that the article is barely begun. This gives a bit of extra impetus to readers to add what they know to an article. There's special tag in our software to mark something as a stub. It looks like this: {{stub}} which makes this appear on the page:

You can add the stub message at the bottom of the page. This reassures readers that we know the article is not complete, and that it's not indicative of the overall quality expected out of Wikivoyage articles. Also, it invites them to add whatever they can to make the article better.

Delete or redirect

Alternatively, if a stub is about a topic that is never going to turn into a worthwhile Wikivoyage article then it should be proposed for deletion if it doesn't align with our goals or else redirected to an appropriate article that the topic can be incorporated into. Redirection or deletion is often a pragmatic decision. There is little point in writing lots of tiny stub articles about small but nearby places (each with only one or two attractions) when a single article about the area all those places are in can cover all the attractions in one hit, and it will not be a stub, because the template can be filled out too.