Wikipedia:What is a page?

Article titles

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

Article 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 articles

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

"Pages" belong to the main namespace of Wikipedia pages (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 pages.

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

The main namespace does not include any pages 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 pages 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 pages in Wikipedia space should be, and interpretations of them (for example, Wikipedia talk:VERIFY and Wikipedia talk:Statistics);
• 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 Wikipedia editors (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 pages in the page namespace are considered to be pages by everyone. Pages in mainspace that are not universally considered pages proper are:

• hundreds of thousands of stand-alone lists (although these are usually treated as pages, and can even be assessed as featured lists) including outlines, glossaries and indices;
• hundreds of thousands of disambiguation pages and set index pages, which are used to resolve naming conflicts;
• many millions of redirect pages, including soft redirects, which are used to re-route one page to another page;
• a small number of mathematical tables and data pages (e.g. Table of divisors, Table of nuclides (segmented, narrow), Ethanol (data page));
• and the Main Page, which is a portal – but it's still in mainspace from a time before any other namespaces existed, and it would be more trouble than it's worth to move it now.

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

Lists of articles and statistics

Special:AllPages has a list of all pages in the page namespace, and Wikipedia:Statistics has statistics on Wikipedia and its growth.

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

See also

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

External links

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