Wikipedia:What is an article?

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What is an article?

See also: Wikipedia:FAQ.

Shortcut: WP:WIAA

A Wikipedia article is a page that has encyclopedic information on it. 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;
pages which contain no internal links;
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 (but in any case, many articles tagged as stubs are quite substantial) or 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.

[edit] Quality of articles

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