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Wikipedia:What is a page?

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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:

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):

Page titles

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

Page scope

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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

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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

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"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:

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:

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

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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

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