Wikipedia:The World Destubathon/Rules
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- All expansions must be done in the article space between 0:00 am on Monday June 16th and 11:59 pm on Wednesday July 16th, strictly on Greenwich Mean Time. You are permitted to work on entries in your sandbox before the contest starts, but they will be rejected if you've edited them in the mainspace before the contest begins.
- Articles are to be submitted in both the main contest achievements on the main page and sub pages by user name, and later for claiming prizes for topics and special prizes.
- Articles can only be submitted once. If it is an article with a dual or multiple country span, pick one country only.'
- All entries submitted must be over 1500 bytes of readable prose once completed. Where there is abundance of information, try to provide more content than the expected minimum and add a few fully sourced paragraphs.
- Articles with stub tags with over 1500 bytes of readable prose in most cases should just be removed and the talk pages updated. If they are over the limit initially and no content is added, just remove the tag.
- Though the main objective is eating away at the 3 million+ articles in the stub categories, articles without stub tags are permitted for the contest if they are under 1.5 kb of readable prose. However, if there is evidence of gaming the system by consistently targetting articles which are very close and adding tiny amounts of text it may lead to being disqualified from competing for the prizes. Try to aim for adding at least one fully sourced paragraph or two minimum.
- Cleanup of articles which aren't stubs is permitted, providing you fully source it and/or rewrite parts of it/expand it. You are permitted to nuke articles and rewrite them from scratch if in a bad state. But expansions must be reasonable, no gaming the system by just adding one source or two and claiming it. Try to add your own material if you can, but don't just paste it around problematic text and ignore what was written before, each entry should read as if you wrote it all yourself.
- Only Dr. Blofeld is permitted to approve entries with a green tick, and only once they are formally approved may you update your claims for topic and special prizes.
- Lists are permitted if the text added is readable prose in the intro and a tabled list with sourced information which is readable, though pure lists of items don't count as readable prose. No cookie cutter text is permitted between lists.
- The stub category system can be a mess in places, common for articles to be well over 1.5 kb and still tagged as being a stub. Editors forget to remove them and update the talk pages. It would be good for editors to help do that, though only add articles to the main article list that you've at least added a bit of content or sources to.
- All entries must be sourced to Wikipedia:Reliable sources, no unsourced claims, and are expected to be well-written in English. Take extra care to avoid copyright and paraphrasing, as recurrent problems may lead to being disqualified.
- Make sure all of the claims made in the intro are sourced in the body if your destub has an article structure. Nothing should be claimed in the intro which isn't supported in the body. If there are old claims you can't source, remove them.
- Try to avoid super short intros with none of the article summarized. Where possible try to add some important basic facts which are sourced in the body to help readers.
- If there is evidence of attempting to game the system by mass generating your own stubs earlier in June and adding a tiny amount of content to each to get it over the 1500 bytes mark it may lead to being disqualified from the contest.
- No cookie cutter articles, which are exactly the same articles aside from a few altered numbers are permitted, unless you make the effort to add text which is unique to each article or reword it. In some cases where there are a lot of figures, such as planes and ships, a similar structure in the description is permitted between articles for consistency up until a point (see stacking below), but try to make the text unique.
- No ChatBot AI text with bad sourcing is permitted. Evidence of mass generating text using AI without fully verifying material yourself and irresponsible use may lead to disqualification.
- References must be fully formatted with the relevant author, title, publisher, date, accessdate (if all applicable information). If the source is in another language, state it (e.g. language=French in the parameters). No bare URLs or scruffy, inconsistently formatted references.
- Public domain/CC/attributed text is permitted, but avoid copying and pasting full articles and leaving it at that. Some effort should be made to adapt the text for Wikipedia and try to integrate several other sources and content. It is not acceptable to just dump text in articles. Ensure that articles incorporating such texts are fully attributed and sourced.
- Translations from other Wikipedias are permitted, but make sure all claims translated are verifiable and add a tag {{Translated|es|Article title on other Wikipedia}} on the talk where you enter the relevant Wikipedia you've translated from (es=Spanish in given example, fr=French, de=German etc) and the title on the other Wikipedia at the end of the template.
- For translations consider using DeepL if not fluent.
- When submitting entries, ensure that you state the country and what the current bytes of readable prose is.
- Note that the main contest entries will be judged in the by user name page/s, not in the by topic column to reduce the time it takes to judge the contest. But you may also place entries under your name in the relevant topic column during the course of the contest.
- Make sure you remove stub tags from the articles once expanded and update the talk page WikiProject templates to start class or C or B class if a sizeable expansion.