Wikipedia:What is an article

From Free net encyclopedia

See also: Wikipedia:FAQ

A Wikipedia article is defined as a page that has encyclopedic or almanac-like information on it ("almanac-like" being lists, timelines, tables or charts).

See Special:Allpages for a list of all Wikipedia articles and Wikipedia:Statistics for statistics on Wikipedia and its growth.

An "article" does not include any pages in any of the specified namespaces that are used for particular purposes, such as:

the Wikipedia namespace for material about meta subjects related to Wikipedia (example, Wikipedia:Statistics and its talk page, Wikipedia talk:Statistics);
the talk namespaces for discussing what the content of pages should be (for example, Talk:Mathematics)
the special namespace, whose pages are created by the software on demand (see Wikipedia:Special pages);
the user namespace for pages that are used by individual Wikipedia writers (example, User:Jimbo Wales).
the image namespace which is used for describing and attributing images (example, Image:Great Horned Owl.USFWS.jpg)
the MediaWiki namespace which is used to define shortcuts and other text strings used around Wikipedia (example MediaWiki:Disclaimers)

But not all pages in the article namespace are considered to be articles; the most notable exceptions are:

the Main Page;
thousands of "stub" pages that may not be considered real articles yet;
thousands of disambiguation pages which are used to resolve naming conflicts;
thousands of "redirect" pages which are used to re-route one page to another page;

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 and Stublists (lists templates with little or no content).

See Wikipedia:Naming conventions to learn how we title articles and Wikipedia:List of protected pages for a list of pages that have been made read-only to non-Wikipedia Administrators.

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