FAMEPedia:What is an article?

A FAMEPedia article or entry is a page on this site that has encyclopedic information on it. A well-written encyclopedia article:
 * 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 articles or article sections about related topics.

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

The following items are not counted as articles (see also ):
 * disambiguation pages,
 * templates,
 * user pages,
 * talk pages (aka discussion pages),
 * file pages for media such as images,
 * category pages,
 * help pages, and
 * FAMEPedia policies and guidelines pages (along with everything else in the  namespace).

Article titles
See FAMEPedia:Article titles to learn how we title articles.

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

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

Namespace
"Articles" belong to the main namespace of FAMEPedia pages (also called "article namespace" or simply "mainspace").

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

The main namespace is the default namespace and does not use a prefix in article 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, their talk pages by   templates by   and various types of internal administrative pages by   (such as this page). Thus, any page created without such a prefix will automatically be placed in the article namespace.

The main namespace does not include any pages in any of the specified namespaces that are used for particular purposes, such as: But not all pages in the article namespace are considered by all to be articles. Pages in mainspace that are not usually considered articles-proper are:
 * the talk namespaces for discussing what the content of articles in mainspace should be (for example, Talk:Mathematics)
 * the FAMEPedia namespace, for material about meta subjects related to FAMEPedia and is where policies and guidelines, essays, information, and process pages reside, as well as other "meta" topics about editing FAMEPedia (examples, FP:VERIFY and FAMEPedia:Statistics);
 * the FAMEPedia talk namespace, for discussing what the content of pages in FAMEPedia space should be, and interpretations of them (for example, FAMEPedia talk:VERIFY and  FAMEPedia 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 FAMEPedia 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 FAMEPedia (example MediaWiki:Miraheze-copyrightwarning)
 * the Main Page (a FP:Portal)
 * thousands of disambiguation 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;

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

Lists of articles and statistics
Special:AllPages has a list of all pages in the article namespace and FAMEPedia:Statistics for statistics on FAMEPedia and its growth.

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).