Wikipedia:What is an article?

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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:

the Wikipedia namespace for pages about 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 when it is needed (see Wikipedia:Special pages);
the user namespace for pages that are used by individual Wikipedia writers (example, User:Archer7).
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;
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.

[change] Quality of articles

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.