Wikicpa:Stub articles
From Wikicpa
A stub article is any article in Wiki CPA that has very little information and is of little use to the reader in its current state.
The question of which articles are stubs is a tricky one. Very short articles are stubs - if an article is only 2-3 sentences long, it is almost certainly a stub. But just increasing the length is not enough to make the article lose its stubbiness. It is better to look at its usefulness to the reader.
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 article? Is that the expected length of articles for Wiki CPA? Where's all the info? Stubs can give a bad first impression if people haven't seen other Wiki CPA articles.
Mostly, though, stubs are a good thing. A stub is the seedling from which the full plant of an article emerges. One can add a stub, and other Wiki CPA readers will come along and add more information to it. Someone else comes in and reformats the article. Eventually, the tiny one-sentence stub becomes a healthy, useful article.
Practical stub-making
If you make a stub article, or see one that someone else has made, it's good to add a little disclaimer that says that the article isn't done yet. It gives a bit of extra impetus to readers to add what they know to an article. There's special markup in our software to mark something as a stub. It looks like this:
- {{stub}}
...which makes this appear on the page:
| This article is still a stub and needs your attention. It currently contains minimal information. Please plunge forward and help it grow! |
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 Wikitravel articles. Also, it invites them to add whatever they can to make the article better.
Best of all, other Wiki CPA readers can use the What links here feature on the WikiCPA:Stubs needing attention page to check for new stubs needing attention -- although it'd be preferable if you did that when you first detected the stub.
Taking out stub disclaimers
When the article starts getting bigger and more useful, it's not a stub any more, and the disclaimer can be removed.
