Wikipedia:What is a page?

For genuine help on what an article is, see Wikipedia:What is an article?

Wikipedia data structure

Namespaces
Subject namespaces		Talk namespaces
0	(Main/Article)	Talk	1
2	User	User talk	3
4	Wikipedia	Wikipedia talk	5
6	File	File talk	7
8	MediaWiki	MediaWiki talk	9
10	Template	Template talk	11
12	Help	Help talk	13
14	Category	Category talk	15
100	Portal	Portal talk	101
118	Draft	Draft talk	119
126	MOS	MOS talk	127
710	TimedText	TimedText talk	711
828	Module	Module talk	829
Former namespaces
108	Book	Book talk	109
442	Course	Course talk	443
444	Institution	Institution talk	445
446	Education Program	Education Program talk	447
2300	Gadget	Gadget talk	2301
2302	Gadget definition	Gadget definition talk	2303
2600	Topic		2601
Virtual namespaces
-1	Special
-2	Media
Current list

A Wikipedia page or entry is an article on this site that has encyclopedic information on it. A well-written encyclopedia page:

• identifies a notable topic,
• summarizes that topic comprehensively,
• is written in an encyclopedic style of language,
• has been well copyedited,
• contains references to reliable sources, and
• contains wikilinks to and is linked to by other pages or page sections about related topics.

Most pages consist of paragraphs and images (perhaps with other types of audiovisual media). However, pages may also be formatted as stand-alone lists or tables (not to be confused with disambiguation articles which are purely navigation aids). These lists or tables are also considered pages for Wikipedia's purposes and are included in the Main/page namespace, the one without a title prefix followed by a colon (:).

The following items are not counted as pages (see also Wikipedia:Administration § Data structure and development):

• disambiguation articles,
• templates,
• navboxes (aka navigation boxes),
• user articles,
• talk articles (aka discussion articles),
• file articles for media such as images,
• category articles,
• help articles, and
• Wikipedia policies and guidelines articles (along with everything else in the Wikipedia: namespace).

Page titles

See Wikipedia:Page titles to learn how we title pages.

Page scope

Each page has a scope, which is what the page covers. The page should contain a readable summary of everything within the scope, given due weight, based on what reliable sources say.

Quality of pages

Pages range greatly in quality, from as high as featured pages to as low as candidates for speedy deletion. Some pages are quite lengthy and rich in content while others are shorter (possibly stubs) or of lesser quality.

Namespace

Main page: Wikipedia:Administration § Data structure and development

"Pages" belong to the main namespace of Wikipedia articles (also called "page namespace" or simply "mainspace").

The main namespace, page namespace, or mainspace is the namespace of Wikipedia that contains the encyclopedia proper—that is, where "live" Wikipedia pages reside, as opposed to Sandbox articles.

The main namespace is the default namespace and does not use a prefix in page article names. This is distinct from other namespaces where article names are always prefixed by an indicator of the particular namespace in which the article resides. For example, all user articles are prefixed by "User:", their talk articles by "User talk:" templates by "Template:" and various types of internal administrative articles by "Wikipedia:" (such as this article). Thus, any article created without such a prefix will automatically be placed in the page namespace.

The main namespace does not include any articles in any of the specified namespaces that are used for particular purposes, such as:

• the talk namespaces for discussing what the content of pages in mainspace should be (for example, Talk:Mathematics)
• the Wikipedia namespace, for material about meta subjects related to Wikipedia and is where policies and guidelines, essays, information, and process articles reside, as well as other "meta" topics about editing Wikipedia (examples, WP:VERIFY and Wikipedia:Statistics);
• the Wikipedia talk namespace, for discussing what the content of articles in Wikipedia space should be, and interpretations of them (for example, Wikipedia talk:VERIFY and Wikipedia talk:Statistics);
• the special namespace, whose articles are created by the software on demand (see Help:Special article);
• the user namespace for articles that are used by individual Wikipedia writers (example, User:Example).
• the file namespace which is used for describing and attributing images (example, File:Great Horned Owl.USFWS.jpg)
• the MediaWiki namespace which is used to define shortcuts and other text strings used around Wikipedia (example MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning)

But not all articles in the page namespace are considered by all to be pages. Articles in mainspace that are not usually considered pages-proper are:

• the Main article (a WP:Portal)
• thousands of disambiguation articles, which are used to resolve naming conflicts;
• many millions of redirect articles, including soft redirects, which are used to re-route one article to another article;

Every article in the main namespace can have a companion talk article, and these belong to the "Talk" namespace, i.e., the articlenames start with the prefix "Talk:", followed by the name of the article in the main namespace. For example, "Talk:Wikipedia" is the talk article for Wikipedia's page on Wikipedia itself.

Lists of pages and statistics

Special:AllArticles has a list of all articles in the page namespace and Wikipedia:Statistics for statistics on Wikipedia and its growth.

The automatic definition used by the software at Special:Statistics is: any article that is in the page namespace, is not a redirect article and contains at least one wiki link. The statistics software currently has no method of detecting disambiguation articles, however; nor does it disregard stubs (but in any case, many pages tagged as stubs are quite substantial) or stublists (lists templates with little or no content).

See also

• Wikipedia:Administration
• Wikipedia:Who writes Wikipedia?
• Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia
• Wikipedia:Subarticles
• Wikipedia:Featured article criteria
• What counts as a page (from English Wikipedia's newsletter, The Signpost)

External links

• Special:Statistics (current page count)
• More detailed (but less current) statistics