Most articles consist of paragraphs and images (perhaps with other types of audiovisual media). However, articles may also be formatted asstand-alone lists ortables (not to be confused withdisambiguation pages, which are purelynavigation aids). These lists or tables are also considered articles for Wikipedia's purposes and are included in themain or article namespace, the onewithout a title prefix and colon (e.g.Template:).
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 whatreliable sources say.
"Articles" belong to themain namespace of Wikipedia pages (also called "article namespace" or simply "mainspace").
The main namespace, article namespace, or mainspace is thenamespace of Wikipedia that contains the encyclopedia proper – that is, where "live" Wikipedia articles reside, as opposed tosandbox 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, alluser pages are prefixed by"User:", theirtalk pages by"User talk:",templates by"Template:", and various types of internal administrative pages by"Wikipedia:" (such as this page). Thus, any page createdwithout such a prefix will automatically be placed in the article namespace.
The main namespace does not include any pages in any of the specifiednamespaces that are used for particular purposes, such as:
thetalk namespaces for discussing what the content of articles in mainspace should be (for example,Talk:Mathematics)
theWikipedia talk namespace, for discussing what the content of pages in Wikipedia space should be, and interpretations of them (for example,Wikipedia talk:VERIFY andWikipedia talk:Statistics);
thespecial namespace, whose pages are created by the software on demand (seeHelp:Special page);
theuser namespace for pages that are used by individual Wikipedia writers (example,User:Example).
theMediaWiki namespace, which is used to define shortcuts and other text strings used around Wikipedia (exampleMediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning)
But not all pages in the article namespace are considered to be articles by everyone. Pages in mainspace that are not universally considered articles-proper are:
Every page in the main namespace can have a companiontalk 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'sarticle on itself.
The automatic definition used by the software atSpecial:Statistics is:any page that is in the article namespace, is not aredirect page and contains at least one wiki link. The statistics software currently has no method of detecting disambiguation pages, however; nor does it disregardstubs (but in any case, many articles tagged as stubs are quite substantial) orstub lists (lists templates with little or no content).
