Wikipedia:What is an article?
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 is a test line to see if anyone can really edit this page.
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 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)
- the MediaWiki namespace which is used to define shortcuts and other text strings used around Wikipedia (example MediaWiki:Disclaimers)
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.