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What is an article?

A Wikipedia article is a page that has information suitable to be in an encyclopedia. See Special:Allpages for a list of all Wikipedia articles and Wikipedia:Statistics for information on Wikipedia and its growth. "Articles" belong to the main namespace of Wikipedia pages (also called "article namespace") which does not include any pages in any of the namespaces below that are used for other purposes, such as:

But not all pages in the article namespace are considered to be articles; the most notable exceptions are:

  • the Main Page;
  • for wiki-statistical purposes, some extremely short and simple pages are not counted as articles. The criteria varied over time.
  • thousands of disambiguation pages which are used to resolve naming conflicts;
  • many millions 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 Special:Protectedpages for a list of pages that have been made read-only to unregistered users or non-administrators.

If you want to start an new (create) an article, enter it's name in the input box below and then click on "Create article". In case the article exists, please make some helpful edits to it.


If you want to search existing articles, please use this input box below.

Quality of articlesEdit

Articles range greatly in quality, from very good articles to candidates for quick deletion. Some articles are quite long and have a lot content while others are shorter (possibly stubs) and of lesser quality.

Related pagesEdit

Other websitesEdit
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