Stub improvement | Discussion | Backlog of the week |

Welcome to the Stub Improvement WikiProject! Our goal here is to get stubs built up into useful, well-sourced articles. Of all Wikipedia articles, 33.495% are currently stubs, approximately 2,300,000 articles.
What is a stub?
A stub is any article that has only basic information while omitting important aspects of the topic. There is no exact size that defines a stub, but most articles under 250–300 words will be considered stubs. Articles with more than 500 words are almost never stubs. Stubs are often tagged with a stub template at the bottom of the article; when the article is expanded, this template should be removed. Occasionally, a "Category" is used to indicate a stub article instead of the stub tag, and those are located near the bottom of the page. Articles may also be classified as stubs on talk page banners, and these banners should be updated as well.
For Stub-class articles, editors may decide that an article:
- With more than ten sentences is too big to be a stub,
- Or that the threshold for another article may be 250 words.
- Others follow the Did you know? standard of 1,500 characters in the main text, which is usually around 300 words.
Article size tool:
- To activate the Prose size tool: Click on Preferences; Gadgets; Browsing; tick "On" at Prosesize: add a toolbox link to show the size of and number of words in a page.
- Within the article:
- Click on "Page size" at the toolbar.
- Look for below line & check length > 1,500...
- For Example: Prose size (text only): 316 B (46 words) "readable prose size"
Articles with few words can be tagged as stub. See WikiProject Stub sorting for details about appropriate stub tag assignment.
How to participate
Participating is simple:
- Pick a stub.
- Find one or more reliable sources about that topic.
- Summarize those sources in the article.
- Once it's no longer a stub, list it as a success at The 50,000 Destubbing Challenge.
- Wikipedia:Database reports/Long stubs, a weekly bot generated report of long articles with stub tag.
- If stub can be removed, do so:
- Edit Summary:
rm stub; Wikipedia:Database reports/Long stubs; Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub improvement; [[WP:STIM|you can help!]]
- Edit Summary:
- Run Rater article assessment tool and update WikiProject Class/Importance as needed. Note: the ORES prediction percent is a confidence estimate. Espescially for lower confidence values the rating may not be accurate, so use your best judgement for WikiProject Class, Importance. Stub-class
- If stub can be removed, do so:
For Stub-class articles, here is a PetScan example to create a smaller group of articles from a large category.
- Depth: 1
Categories: Stub-Class football in France articles (Note: over 8,000 articles) - Page properties:
- Namespaces - add Talk
Size - Smaller or equal - 100 ( Results = 247 )
Redirects - No, No, No
- Namespaces - add Talk
- Output: HTML or Plain text
Sort: by title
Since the Stub class is set on the article's Talk page, review each article for a missing stub tag (to add) if needed; or if the article is improved, remove the stub tag and upgrade to class "Start" or higher.
Participants
- MorbidEntree (talk · contribs)
- Gug01 (talk · contribs)
- User:Sɛvɪnti faɪv (talk · contribs)
- CircleGirl (talk · contribs)
- OliverEastwood (talk · contribs)
- Thebiguglyalien (talk · contribs)
- Edward-Woodrow (talk · contribs)
- Oltrepier (talk · contribs)
- Arotparaarms (talk · contribs)
- Pascal Kings (talk · contribs)
- Freeguy01 (talk · contribs)
- Tavantius (talk · contribs)
- Kvng (talk · contribs)
- CybJubal (talk · contribs)
Helpful links
Essays
- Wikipedia:Abandoned stubs
- Wikipedia:An unfinished house is a real problem
- User:Grutness/Croughton-London rule of stubs
- Wikipedia:Don't hope the house will build itself
- Wikipedia:One sentence does not an article make
Templates
This WikiProject does not use a WikiProject banner, as stubs are already designated through stub templates, and those are maintained at WikiProject Stub sorting. But we do have userboxes that you can place on your user page:
- User:Sɛvɪnti faɪv/User Anti stub
- Template:User Anti-stub WikiProject
- Template:User WikiProject Stub improvement
Template code | Result | ||
---|---|---|---|
{{User WikiProject Stub improvement}} |
|
Related WikiProjects
- Wikipedia:Article Rescue Squadron
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Notability
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Orphanage
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Reliability
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced articles
Related categories
- Category:All articles lacking reliable references: 92,306 articles
- Category:Articles lacking reliable references: 220 months
- Category:All articles with unsourced statements: 541,032 articles
- Category:Articles with unsourced statements: 240 months
- Category:Articles with unsourced statements from March 2025: 1,314 articles
- Category:Articles with unsourced statements from February 2025: 22,425 articles
- Category:All articles lacking sources: 67,810 articles
- Category:Articles lacking sources: 202 months
- Category:Articles lacking sources from March 2025: 61 articles
- Category:Articles lacking sources from February 2025: 565 articles