All The Tropes:Stub Pages
A stub is a page which, in the opinion of at least one editor, Needs a Better Description, Needs More Examples, Needs More Love or just needs more something before it can be considered Ready For Primetime.
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,[1] and at least two categories other than the default "Work" and "{{PAGENAME}}". 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[2] 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.
Marking Stubs
If you find a page that seems far too brief or otherwise insufficient to its topic, feel free to add the appropriate stub notice to it if you cannot for some reason expand the page yourself.
A stub page is identified by the presence of one (or in some rare cases, more) of the following notices:
These are entered into the page source using the templates {{workstub}}, {{tropestub}}, {{creatorstub}}, and {{stub}}, respectively. Please use {{stub}} on Useful Notes stub pages.
Adding {{tropestub}} to a page also lists the page in the Trope Workshop - so please use that tag only on trope pages!
Finding and Fixing Stubs
A stub notice is both a cry for help and an invitation to provide it -- if you see a page for a topic you know something about with a stub notice on it, by all means please share what you know.
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 find a page which seems more than adequate in your opinion but still has a stub notice on it, feel free to remove it. If other editors disagree with you, it'll go back in. That's fine -- it's part of the Wiki Magic. We don't want to see Edit Wars over stub status, though.
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.
- ↑ At least one mod sets "a handful" at a dozen; your mileage may vary.
- ↑ Yes, we know that there is no such thing as notability here. A list of notable works or roles is a starting point, not an end goal.