Draft:What is an article?

For the guideline on definite and indefinite articles in article titles, see BattleTechWiki:Naming conventions (definite or indefinite article at beginning of name).

See also: BattleTechWiki:FAQ

BattleTechWiki data structure

Namespaces
Subject namespaces		Talk namespaces
0	(Main/Article)	Talk	1
2	User	User talk	3
4	BattleTechWiki	BattleTechWiki 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	Policy	Policy Talk	101
102	Property	Property talk	103
106	Form	Form talk	107
108	Concept	Concept talk	109
112	smw/schema	smw/schema talk	113
114	Rule	Rule talk	115
118	Draft	Draft Talk	119
828	Module	Module talk	829
3000	Portal	Portal Talk	3001
3010	Guideline	Guideline Talk	3011
3012	Information	Information Talk	3013
Virtual namespaces
-1	Special
-2	Media
Current list (API call)

A BattleTechWiki article or entry is a page on this site that has encyclopedic information on it. A well-written encyclopedia article:

• 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 articles or article sections about related topics.

Most articles consist of paragraphs and images (perhaps with other types of audiovisual media). However, articles may also be formatted as stand-alone lists or tables (not to be confused with disambiguation pages, which are purely navigation aids). These lists or tables are also considered articles for BattleTechWiki's purposes and are included in the Main/Article namespace, the one without a title prefix followed by a colon (:).

The following items are not counted as articles (see also BattleTechWiki:Administration § Data structure and development):

• disambiguation pages,
• redirect pages,
• templates, including navboxes (aka navigation boxes),
• user pages,
• drafts,
• portals,
• talk pages (aka discussion pages),
• file pages for media such as images,
• category pages,
• help pages, and
• BattleTechWiki policies and guidelines pages (along with everything else in the BattleTechWiki: namespace).

Article titles

Template:BattleTechWiki article creation See BattleTechWiki: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

Main page: BattleTechWiki:Content assessment

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

Main page: BattleTechWiki:Administration § Data structure and development

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

The main namespace, article namespace, or mainspace is the namespace of BattleTechWiki that contains the encyclopedia proper—that is, where "live" BattleTechWiki 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 "BattleTechWiki:" (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 BattleTechWiki namespace, for material about meta subjects related to BattleTechWiki and is where policies and guidelines, essays, information, and process pages reside, as well as other "meta" topics about editing BattleTechWiki (examples, BTW:VERIFY and BattleTechWiki:Statistics);
• the BattleTechWiki talk namespace, for discussing what the content of pages in BattleTechWiki space should be, and interpretations of them (for example, BattleTechWiki talk:VERIFY and BattleTechWiki 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 BattleTechWiki 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 BattleTechWiki (example MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning)

But not all pages in the article namespace are considered by all to be articles. Pages in mainspace that are not usually considered articles-proper are:

• the Main Page (a BTW:Portal)
• 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;

Every page in the main namespace can have a companion talk 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:BattleTechWiki" is the talk page for BattleTechWiki's article on itself.

Lists of articles and statistics

Special:AllPages has a list of all pages in the article namespace, and BattleTechWiki:Statistics has statistics on BattleTechWiki 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 stub lists (lists templates with little or no content).

See also

• BattleTechWiki:Administration
• BattleTechWiki:Who writes BattleTechWiki?
• BattleTechWiki:Contributing to BattleTechWiki
• BattleTechWiki:Subpages
• BattleTechWiki:Featured article criteria
• What counts as an Article (from English BattleTechWiki's newsletter, The Signpost)

External links

• Special:Statistics (current article count)
• More detailed (but less current) statistics