TME:What is an article?
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This is an information page. It describes the editing community's consensus on some aspect or aspects of the norms and practices. It is not one of the policies or guidelines. |
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| Subject namespaces | Talk namespaces | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | (Main/Article) | Talk | 1 |
| 2 | User | User talk | 3 |
| 4 | TME | TME 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 |
| 828 | Module | Module talk | 829 |
| 1624 | Official | Official talk | 1625 |
| 1626 | Portal | Portal talk | 1627 |
| 1628 | Call of Duty | Call of Duty talk | 1629 |
| 1636 | Minecraft | Minecraft talk | 1637 |
| 1638 | Super Mario Land 2 | Super Mario Land 2 talk | 1639 |
| 1640 | Super Mario World 2 | Super Mario World 2 talk | 1641 |
| 1642 | Super Mario Bros. | Super Mario Bros. talk | 1643 |
| 1644 | Super Mario Advance | Super Mario Advance talk | 1645 |
| 1646 | Super Mario Advance 2 | Super Mario Advance 2 talk | 1647 |
| 1648 | Super Mario Advance 3 | Super Mario Advance 3 talk | 1649 |
| 1650 | Super Mario Advance 4 | Super Mario Advance 4 talk | 1651 |
| 1652 | The Legend of Zelda | The Legend of Zelda talk | 1653 |
| 1696 | Timeline | Timeline talk | 1697 |
| 1700 | Draft | Draft talk | 1701 |
| 1710 | Game | Game talk | 1711 |
| 1722 | Civilization IV | Civilization IV talk | 1723 |
| 1736 | Idea | Idea talk | 1737 |
| 1738 | Policy | Policy talk | 1739 |
| 2300 | Gadget | Gadget talk | 2301 |
| 2302 | Gadget definition | Gadget definition talk | 2303 |
| -1 | Special | ||
| -2 | Media | ||
An article, or entry, is a page that has encyclopedic information on it. A well-written encyclopedia article identifies a notable encyclopedic topic, summarizes that topic comprehensively, contains references to reliable sources, and links to other related topics. Most articles consist of paragraphs and images, but they may also be formatted as stand-alone lists or tables. These lists or tables are also considered articles for the encyclopedia's purposes.
Disambiguation pages, templates, navboxes, user pages, discussion pages, file pages, category pages, help pages, and The Multilingual Encyclopedia policy/guideline pages (and everything else in "TME" namespace) are not articles.
- See also: TME:FAQ.
Namespace
"Articles" belong to the main namespace of The Multilingual Encyclopedia pages (also called "article namespace" or simply "mainspace").
The main namespace, article namespace, or mainspace is the namespace of The Multilingual Encyclopedia that contains the encyclopedia proper—that is, where "live" The Multilingual Encyclopedia 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 "User:", their talk pages by "User talk:" templates by "Template:" and various types of internal administrative pages by "TME:" (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:
- the talk namespaces for discussing what the content of articles in mainspace should be (for example, Talk:Mathematics)
- the TME namespace, for material about meta subjects related to The Multilingual Encyclopedia and is where policies and guidelines, essays, information, and process pages reside, as well as other "meta" topics about editing The Multilingual Encyclopedia (example, TME:Statistics);
- the TME talk namespace, for discussing what the content of pages in The Multilingual Encyclopedia space should be, and interpretations of them (for example, TME 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 The Multilingual Encyclopedia 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 The Multilingual Encyclopedia (example MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning)
But not all pages in the article namespace are considered to be articles; the most notable exceptions are:
- the Main Page;
- 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;
- for wiki-statistical purposes, some extremely short and simple pages are not counted as articles. The criteria have varied over time.
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:Wikipedia" is the talk page for The Multilingual Encyclopedia's article on Wikipedia.
External links
- Special:Statistics - Current article count
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This page uses material from Wikipedia:What is an article? on Wikipedia, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors). |