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It is a popularly-held belief that stubs can be defined precisely by the size of the article involved. Once an article hits a certain number of bytes, it is automatically deemed to be no longer a stub. Below that size, it needs a stub template.
This, sadly, is not the case. If it were, it would be possible to totally automate stubbing and stub-sorting, freeing up many man-hours of work on Wikipedia.
There are several reasons why a long page may be a stub, and similarly there are several reasons why a short page may not be a stub. The two simplest of these rules are the following:
Only articles can be stubs. Categories, disambiguation pages, infoboxes, user pages, talk pages, drafts... all of these have their own templates that can be used if they are in some way deficient. None of them can ever be stubs.
List articles, which are a specific type of article in article space, do not get stub templates simply for being short or deficient in scope: they have their own set of templates such as {{listdev}}. An article containing a list may be considered a stub if there is little text other than the list, but not if the the only purpose of the article is to be a list. Some discretion and common sense is required here: a rule of thumb is to ask whether the non-list part of the article could be extended. For example, an article on the States of Nigeria would logically contain a list, but could also contain information on the history of when the state system was set up, what it replaced (if anything), how boundaries have changed over time, and how they are governed. If that is not present, it may still be considered a stub. An article entitled List of rivers of New Zealand, on the other hand, would appropriately contain just a list.
Stubs have very little text. "Text" here refers only to written sentences of information: it excludes images, infoboxes, navigation templates, lists of examples, external links, and any of the other items which may be found on an article, all of which are ostensibly there for the purposes of supporting the actual text of the article. Thus, what may seem to be a long article may in fact be a one-paragraph stub with "peripheral add-ons".
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