PBC:What is an article?

PBC data structure
Namespaces
Subject namespaces		Talk namespaces
0	(Main/Article)	Talk	1
2	User	User talk	3
4	Porn Base Central	Porn Base Central 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
108	Books	Books talk	109
118	Draft	Draft talk	119
446	PBC	PBC talk	447
766	ARB	ARB talk	767
776	A	A talk	777
786	B	B talk	787
796	V	V talk	797
828	Module	Module talk	829
2300	Gadget	Gadget talk	2301
2302	Gadget definition	Gadget definition talk	2303
Virtual namespaces
-1	Special
-2	Media

A PBC 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 PBC's purposes.

Disambiguation pages, templates, navboxes, user pages, discussion pages, file pages, category pages, help pages, and PBC policy pages are not articles (see PBC:GOVP).

See also: PBC:FAQ.

Article title

See PBC: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. For more information see PBC:Standard of Article Quality Policy.

Namespace

Main page: PBC:Administration § Data structure and development

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

The main namespace, article namespace, or mainspace is the namespace of PBC that contains the encyclopedia proper—that is, where "live" PBC 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 "PBC:" (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 PBC namespace, for material about meta subjects related to PBC and is where policies and guidelines, essays, information, and process pages reside, as well as other "meta" topics about editing PBC (examples, PBC:VERIFY and PBC:Statistics);
• the PBC talk namespace, for discussing what the content of pages in PBC space should be, and interpretations of them (for example, PBC talk:VERIFY and PBC 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 PBC writers (example, User:Example).
• the file namespace which is used for describing and attributing images (example, File:Pbc.png)
• the MediaWiki namespace which is used to define shortcuts and other text strings used around PBC (example MediaWiki:Wikimedia-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 thousands 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:PBC" is the talk page for PBC's article on PBC itself.

Lists of articles and statistics

Special:AllPages has a list of all pages in the article namespace and PBC:Statistics for statistics on PBC 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).

See also

• PBC:Administration
• PBC:Who writes PBC?
• PBC:Contributing to PBC
• PBC:Subpages
• PBC:Featured article criteria
• What counts as an Article

External links

• Special:Statistics - Current article count