Wikipedia:Permastub

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Most trees will eventually grow from saplings into large trees. But bonsai trees, like this 400-year-old Japanese White Pine, will always stay tiny.

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:

  • There is little verifiable information to be found on the subject
  • All or most aspects of the subject are already covered in other articles
  • There is little important to say about the subject
  • The article is about a subject that was briefly notable, but no longer receives any coverage
  • The subject is about or is notable for a single event, after which there will never likely be any future coverage

Permastubs are unsatisfying articles – they leave little potential for future editing, and by their nature are not very informative. Where possible, they should be merged to larger articles and redirected there. When there is no possibility for any expansion, nor any topic that they could be merged into, it is possible that a permastub should be deleted.

It is important to note that permastubs are articles that cannot be expanded. 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 Wikipedia:Featured articles on things that are obscure and strange.