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Wikipedia:What is an article?

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Namespaces
Subject namespaces Talk namespaces
0 (Main/Article) Talk 1
2 User User talk 3
4 Wikipedia Wikipedia talk 5
6 File File talk 7
8 MediaWiki MediaWiki talk 9
10 Template Template talk 11
12 Help Help talk 13
14 Category Category talk 15
100 Portal Portal talk 101
118 Draft Draft talk 119
126 MOS MOS talk 127
710 TimedText TimedText talk 711
828 Module Module talk 829
Former namespaces
108 Book Book talk 109
442 Course Course talk 443
444 Institution Institution talk 445
446 Education Program Education Program talk 447
2300 Gadget Gadget talk 2301
2302 Gadget definition Gadget definition talk 2303
2600 Topic 2601
Virtual namespaces
-1 Special
-2 Media
Current list

A Wikipedia article or entry is a page on this site that has encyclopedic information on it. A well-written encyclopedia article:

Most articles consist of paragraphs and images (perhaps with other types of audiovisual media). However, articles may also be formatted as stand-alone lists or tables (not to be confused with disambiguation pages, which are purely navigation aids). These lists or tables are also considered articles for Wikipedia's purposes and are included in the Main/Article namespace, the one without a title prefix followed by a colon (:).

The following items are not counted as articles (see also Wikipedia:Administration § Data structure and development):

Article titles

See Wikipedia:Article titles to learn how we title articles.

Article scope

Each article has a scope, which is what the article covers. The article should contain a readable summary of everything within the scope, given due weight, based on what reliable sources say.

Quality of articles

Articles range greatly in quality, from as high as featured articles to as low as candidates for speedy deletion. Some articles are quite lengthy and rich in content while others are shorter (possibly stubs) or of lesser quality.

Namespace

"Articles" belong to the main namespace of Wikipedia pages (also called "article namespace" or simply "mainspace").

The main namespace, article namespace, or mainspace is the namespace of Wikipedia that contains the encyclopedia proper –that is, where "live" Wikipedia articles reside, as opposed to sandbox pages.

The main namespace is the default namespace and does not use a prefix in article page names. This is distinct from other namespaces, where page names are always prefixed by an indicator of the particular namespace in which the page resides. For example, all user pages are prefixed by "User:", their talk pages by "User talk:", templates by "Template:", and various types of internal administrative pages by "Wikipedia:" (such as this page). Thus, any page created without such a prefix will automatically be placed in the article namespace.

The main namespace does not include any pages in any of the specified namespaces that are used for particular purposes, such as:

But not all pages in the article namespace are considered to be articles by everyone. Pages in mainspace that are not universally considered articles-proper are:

Every page in the main namespace can have a companion talk page, and these belong to the "Talk" namespace, i.e., the page names start with the prefix "Talk:", followed by the name of the page in the main namespace. For example, "Talk:Wikipedia" is the talk page for Wikipedia's article on itself.

Lists of articles and statistics

Special:AllPages has a list of all pages in the article namespace, and Wikipedia:Statistics has statistics on Wikipedia and its growth.

The automatic definition used by the software at Special:Statistics is: any page that is in the article namespace, is not a redirect page and contains at least one wiki link. The statistics software currently has no method of detecting disambiguation pages, however; nor does it disregard stubs (but in any case, many articles tagged as stubs are quite substantial) or stub lists (lists templates with little or no content).

See also