Help:Stub

A stub is an article containing only a few sentences of text which is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, but not so short as to provide no useful information, and it should be capable of expansion. Sizable articles are usually not considered stubs, even if they lack "wikification" or copy editing. With these articles, a cleanup template is usually added instead of a stub template. Note that if a small article has little properly sourced information, or if its subject has no inherent notability, it may be deleted or be merged into another relevant article.

While a "definition" may be enough to qualify an article as a stub, Preservapedia is not a dictionary. The distinction between dictionary and encyclopedia articles is best expressed by the use–mention distinction:
 * A dictionary article is about a word or phrase and will often have several different definitions for it
 * An encyclopedia article is about the subject denoted by the title but usually has only one definition (or in some cases, several definitions that are largely the same) but there may be several equivalent words (synonyms) or phrases for it.

There is no set size at which an article stops being a stub. While very short articles are likely to be stubs, there are some subjects about which there is very little that can be written. Conversely, there are subjects about which a lot could be written - their articles may still be stubs even if they are a few paragraphs long. As such, it is impossible to state whether an article is a stub based solely on its length, and any decision on the article has to come down to an editor's best judgement. Similarly, stub status usually depends on the length of prose text alone - lists, templates, images, and other such peripheral parts of an article are usually not considered when judging whether an article is a stub.