Familypedia:What is an article?

What is an article?

(This is largely unchanged from its source page in Wikipedia, which is a general-purpose encyclopedia. Not all of this page is exactly applicable to the Genealogy Wikia, which has a mixture of encyclopedic information and "non-notable" information and opinions about and from ordinary people and their researchers.)

[edit] Introduction

A Wikipedia article is a page that has encyclopedic information on it. See Wikipedia:Special:Allpages for a list of all Wikipedia articles and Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Statistics for statistics on Wikipedia and its growth.

[edit] What is not an article?

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

• the talk namespaces, for discussing aspects of the content of pages in corresponding namespaces (for example, Talk:Cemeteries and Genealogy talk:Charting ancestors)
• the Genealogy namespace, for material about meta-subjects related to genealogy (example, Genealogy:Charting ancestors);
• the help namespace, which is used for pages intended to help contributors and/or readers to get the most out of their experience here (example Help:Contents);
• the image namespace, describing and attributing images (example, Image:180px-Sasha Kopf's Celtic knot ring.jpg)
• the MediaWiki namespace, which is used to define shortcuts and other text strings used around Wikia (example MediaWiki:Sidebar)
• the special namespace, whose pages are created by the software on demand (see Help:Special page);
• the user namespace, for pages that are used by individual Wikia writers (example, User:Yewenyi).

But not even all pages in the article or main namespace (i.e. those with no prefix) are considered to be articles; the most notable exceptions are:

• the Main Page;
• pages containing no internal links;
• the many disambiguation pages, which are used to resolve naming conflicts;
• the many redirect pages, which are used to re-route one page to another page automatically.

The standard definition used by the software at Wikipedia: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).

[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.

[edit] See also

• Category:Naming conventions to learn how we title articles
• Special:Protectedpages for a list of pages that have been made read-only to unregistered users or non-administrators

[edit] External links

• Current number of articles; and related data
• Wikipedia:Wikipedia:What is a featured article?
• Wikipedia:Wikipedia:FAQ