Wikipedia:WikiProject Chicago/Stubify

The is a general how to guide to stubifying an ariticle. I.E., it is a brief on how to create a stub. This guide was created to assist the May 9 2007 WP:CHICOTW, which is to stubify the Chicago Landmark page.

There are basically 5 steps to creating a good quick stub

Write a brief summary of the topic at hand.
Identify proper WP:STUBS to classify your article.
Identify proper categories to classify your article.
Identify the proper templates to bolster your article with navigational assistance.
Properly tag the talk page.

WP:CHICOTW week example

Yesterday, I created Old Colony Building (Chicago), Fisher Building (Chicago), McGraw-Hill Building (Chicago), & Victory Monument (Chicago). These were pages that I had earlier discovered had some ambiguities (which you can see by the parenthetical names). These are all examples of what the most basic Chicago Landmark Category:Stub-Class Chicago articles should look like. Stubs can look better than this, but I hope each page will at least look like these. Following the instructions herein should suffice. If you get adventurous you may also attempt to add {{Infobox building}}, {{Infobox nrhp}}, and some images and take the article to Category:Start-Class Chicago articles. If you stumble upon something interesting nominate it for WP:CHICOTW by naming it with a 25 word or less explanation of its import here. Also, list all newly created articles from the stubification drive here: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Chicago#Newly_Created_Chicago_Related_Pages. If any of the landmarks is at least 12 stories please add it to Template:Chicago Skyscrapers like I did here.

Brief text

Text is all that is required of an article. However, to increase the chances of surviving a WP:AFD challenge the following sections will improve the article's viability. In general you want to briefly define the title of the article. For a stub. even a few sentences can suffice. Text such as

XXXX is a building in the YYY community area of Chicago, Illinois. It was named a Chicago Landmark on [[Month day]], [[Year]]. It was also added to the National Register of Historic Places on [[Month day]], [[Year]].

is a good start for a stub.

For a Landmark stub just adding an ==External links== section with one or two links would be fine. I would suggest the proper page from

*[http://www.ci.chi.il.us/Landmarks/List.html Chicago Landmark page]
*[http://www.emporis.com/en Emporis.com page] (if it is a substantial existing building)

In order to find the proper emporis page do a google search with the name of the building and the word emporis.

However, proper citation like the examples in the section above would be better.

Stubs

Almost every WP:WPChi stub should have a {{Chicago-stub}} tag. In general, you should determine whether the article is about a person place or thing. For the WP:WPChi the general stubs for places are {{Chicago-geo-stub}}, which would replace the aforementioned stub. For a WP:WPChi thing (building or structure), generally {{Illinois-struct-stub}} is a good stub to add. For a person, many personalized stubs are available based on the persons role. At WP:STUBS, a search on "bio-stub" will lead you through the possibilities. There are no regional stubs listed, but common stubs may be {{US-business-bio-stub}}, {{US-screen-actor-stub}}, {{US-film-actor-stub}}, {{US-poli-bio-stub}}, or {{US-sport-bio-stub}}. For the Chicago Landmark project a common stub tag would be {{NRHP-stub}}.

Thus a typical stub section for a Chicago Landmark article might be

{{Illinois-struct-stub}}
{{NRHP-stub}}
{{Chicago-stub}}

or

In addition, stubs such as {{US-theat-stub}} and {{Music-venue-stub}} may be common.

Templates

Good template serve as a good navigational aid. In general, a WP:WPChi article should be tagged with

In addition, a National Register of Historic Places structure should have

Chicago landmarks at least 12 stories high should have

You will have to edit the skyscraper tag to include the newly created article.

Chicago Landmark templates include the following:

Thus, a tall WP:WPChi Chicago landmark could have a template section like this

Infobox

Often adding an infobox and a picture can take an article from stub to start class. A decent article with 4 or 5 meaty paragraphs a few good templates might get promoted to start. I am not asking you to create 4 or 5 meaty paragraphs here. In fact, an infobox is a bonus for what we are doing. However, if you are doing a National Register of Historic Places property use this infobox tool to create a {{Infobox nrhp}} that you can copy and paste into your stub. Other very useful infoboxes are {{Infobox building}} and {{Infobox artwork}}. However, most of these take a little time to understand how the parameters work.

Talk page

In general, you want to do your best to seek the attention of the proper interest groups for an article. The stubs, categories and templates all do this. In addition, the talk page can notify Wikipedia:WikiProjects of relevant new articles.

For the Chicago Landmark project the following could be added to the talk page if an article is an NHRP property as well as a landmark. Of course, the relevance of lines 3 and 4 depends on the article.

{{WikiProjectBanners
|1={{ChicagoWikiProject|class=stub|importance=mid|needs-infobox=Yes|needs-photo=Yes |attention= }}
|2={{WikiProject Illinois|class=stub|importance=}}
|3={{Architecture|class=stub|importance=}}
|4={{WikiProject National Register of Historic Places|class=stub|importance=}}
}}

For the Chicago Landmark project the following could be added to the talk page if an article is not an NHRP property as well as a landmark.

{{WikiProjectBanners
|1={{ChicagoWikiProject|class=stub|importance=low|needs-infobox=Yes|needs-photo=Yes |attention= }}
|2={{WikiProject Illinois|class=stub|importance=}}
|3={{Architecture|class=stub|importance=}}
}}

Most Wikiprojects have talk page banners. A couple of other common ones could be used as follows
{{WPBiography|living = no|class = Stub|importance=mid|needs-infobox = yes|listas = Wrigley, William III |needs-photo = yes}}
{{WikiProject Business & Economics|class = Stub|importance=mid}}