Jump to content

Wikipedia:What is an article?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Mav (talk | contribs) at 20:03, 16 August 2002 (minor revert for clarity). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

NOTE: This page is still a work in progress and any help with editing or suggestions on a better page title are most welcome. The intended audience is new users and visitors, so please let's keep this brief and informative. When this page is deemed acceptable it will be linked from the main page under the first occurrence of the word "article".

Wikipedia:FAQ

There are many pages in Wikipedia, far more pages than we actually consider to be articles.

For calculating our site statistics we use a very conservative definition for "article", such that article counts are pretty unimpeachable.

In normal conversation, an "article" is simply the name for pages in the main namespace (that is, pages without a preceding namespace such as "Talk:", "Wikipedia:" ,"Special:") that aren't redirects or disambiguation pages. For site statistics, short entries are ignored.

A Wikipedia article can be defined as a page in the database that either has encyclopedic or almanac-like information on it ("almanac-like" being; lists, timelines or charts).

This does not include any pages in any of the specified namespaces that we use for particular purposes, such as:

All these specified namespaces also have a yellowish background color to distinguish them from pages in the article namespace which have white backgrounds.

However, there are many non-articles in the article namespace; most notably:

  • the Main Page;
  • hundreds of very short "stub" pages that cannot be considered real articles yet;
  • hundreds of disambiguation pages which are used to resolve naming conflicts;
  • thousands of "redirect" pages which are used to re-route traffic going to one page to another page.

If you see a statistic about Wikipedia that tells the number of articles (currently 6,911,325), the software is using the above guidelines to arrive at that number. However, it's not perfect. We can't automatically detect disambiguation pages, and even stub pages can only be measured approximately (the software thinks that a stub is any page that doesn't contain a comma, which isn't necessarily correct).

Relation to naming conventions

It should be noted that our naming conventions only cover what articles should be named. Therefore it is perfectly fine to use whatever capitalization, pluralization or transliteration you like for your user page and even pages in the other namespaces (except special, which can only be created by the software developers).

Relation to protected pages

The Main Page and a few of the most important policy pages in the Wikipedia: namespace (such as Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines) are protected, because experience has shown that the main page is a major target for vandals and Wikipedia policy has to be agreed to by consensus before being changed. But every article, as well as the vast majority of non-article pages, can be edited by anybody, including you right now!

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:What_is_an_article%3F&oldid=159310"