TechInfoDepot:What is an article?


 * See also: TechInfoDepot:FAQ.

A TechInfoDepot article, or entry, is a page that has techclopedic information on it. A well-written techclopedia article identifies a notable techclopedic 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 TechInfoDepot's purposes.

Disambiguation pages, templates, navboxes, and similar supporting pages are not articles.

Article title
See TechInfoDepot: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.

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

The main namespace, article namespace or mainspace is the namespace of TechInfoDepot that contains the encyclopedia proper—that is, where "live" TechInfoDepot 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, their talk pages by   templates by   and various types of internal administrative pages by   (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: But not all pages in the article namespace are considered to be articles; the most notable exceptions are:
 * the TechInfoDepot namespace for material about meta subjects related to TechInfoDepot (example, TechInfoDepot:Statistics and its talk page, TechInfoDepot talk:Statistics);
 * the talk namespaces for discussing what the content of pages should be (for example, Talk:Mathematics)
 * 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 TechInfoDepot 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 TechInfoDepot (example MediaWiki:Disclaimers)
 * 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:TechInfoDepot" is the talk page for TechInfoDepot's article on TechInfoDepot itself.

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