Wikipedia:What is a page?

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

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 ):
 * disambiguation articles,
 * templates,
 * navboxes (aka navigation boxes),
 * user articles,
 * talk articles (aka discussion articles),
 * file articles for media such as images,
 * category articles,
 * help articles, and
 * Wikipedia policies and guidelines articles (along with everything else in the  namespace).

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

Page scope
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
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
"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, their talk articles by   templates by   and various types of internal administrative articles by   (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:
 * the talk namespaces for discussing what the content of pages in mainspace should be (for example, Talk:Mathematics)
 * the Wikipedia namespace, for material about meta subjects related to Wikipedia and is where policies and guidelines, essays, information, and process articles reside, as well as other "meta" topics about editing Wikipedia (examples, WP:VERIFY and Statistics);
 * the Wikipedia talk namespace, for discussing what the content of articles in Wikipedia space should be, and interpretations of them (for example, Wikipedia talk:VERIFY and  Wikipedia talk:Statistics);
 * the special namespace, whose articles are created by the software on demand (see Help:Special article);
 * the user namespace for articles that are used by individual Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia (example MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning)
 * the Main article (a WP:Portal)
 * thousands of disambiguation articles, which are used to resolve naming conflicts;
 * many millions of redirect articles, including soft redirects, which are used to re-route one article to another article;

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
Special:AllArticles has a list of all articles in the page namespace and 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).