Wikipedia:What is an article
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
See Special:Allpages for a list of all Wikipedia articles.
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).
This 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 four 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:Larry Sanger).
- the image namespace which is used for describing and attributing images (example, Image:Great Horned Owl.USFWS-thumb.jpg)
Pages from these namespaces are displayed on a yellow background to distinguish them from pages in the article namespace which have white backgrounds.
But not all pages in the article namespace are considered to be articles; most notably:
- 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 (white background), is not a redirect page and contains at least one wiki link. The software currently has no method of detecting disambiguation pages, however.
See Wikipedia:Naming conventions to learn how we title articles and Wikipedia:protected pages for a list of pages that have been made read-only to non-Wikipedia Administrators.