All The Tropes:Stub Pages

Quoting Wikipedia: "A stub is an article that, although providing some useful information, lacks the breadth of coverage expected".

On All The Tropes, the "breadth of coverage" for works includes at minimum the work's name, a spoiler-free description of the work, a handful of tropes, and at least two categories other than the default "Work" and " ". If it's an online work, a link to the work is also part of that minimum.

The "breadth of coverage" for creators includes a short biography of the creator (one paragraph will do) and either a list of the creator's most notable works or roles or a list of tropes often used or shown by the creator. (If the page has both, it might not be a stub any more.)

The "breadth of coverage" for tropes is discussed at All The Tropes:Trope Workshop Guidelines.

When Do Pages Stop Being Stubs?
Again quoting Wikipedia: "There is no set size at which an article stops being a stub." What matters is the content, not the text length; Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness will not magically turn a stub into a not-stub.

All The Tropes exists in large part to provide analysis of works. If there's enough information on the page to provide that analysis (or let casual readers carry out that analysis themselves), then the page is no longer a stub.

And if a work page covers everything that's listed at All The Tropes:Works Page Guidelines, it definitely isn't a stub.

What Stub Pages Are Not
Stub pages are not "incomplete" pages – at least, not in any fundamentally different way from how all wiki pages are "incomplete". No page on the wiki is ever truly complete; circumstances change, things become known or forgotten, new tropes and works are written, and other things happen that mean even the oldest, heavily-analyzed, trope-overdosed pages can never truly be called "complete". Stub pages are just a bit sparse in information.

It appears that we actually have to say this... Stub pages are not pages that have been nominated for deletion. The stub templates exist to direct tropers to pages that need more work, not warn of their impending doom. This leads to an obvious corollary: that work pages do not ever get deleted unless they are bogus, plagiarized, or otherwise violate wiki rules.

What Are Not Stub Pages
Disambiguation pages (that help readers find the correct page in a group of similarly-named pages) are never considered to be stub pages. Disambiguation pages are indexes, not articles.

Finding Stubs
If you're here because you want to find a page to improve, great! Here's the list; pick one (or more) and take the plunge!

Just keep in mind that we aren't legally allowed to use content that was added to TV Tropes after mid-2012, please.

If you wish to see previous versions of this policy, or you want to know when this policy was last updated and what was changed, please review the page history by selecting "History" from the menu at the top of this page.