This is an essay on Wikipedia's Stub guidelines. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
A permastub is an article that is currently a stub and has no reasonable prospect for expansion. There can be many reasons for this. These include:
It is important to note that permastubs are articles that either cannot be expanded or have little potential. A stub – even a stub on what you see as a trivial topic – is not a permastub if there is verifiable and encyclopedic information that can be added to it. The importance of a topic is not a factor in how much can be written about it – we have featured articles on things that are obscure and strange.
There are tens of thousands of informative stubs that to expand would only be adding puffery, padding, and undue weight. Paper encyclopedias are full of informative, concise stubs. Finished permastubs likewise don't need expansion.
Some permastubs may be:
For some permastubs, the best course of action might be merging them into larger articles and transforming them into redirects. In some cases, an argument might be made for deletion.