DDO wiki:Mainspace

A DDOwiki 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 DDOwiki's purposes.

Disambiguation pages, Templates, navboxes, user pages, discussion pages, file pages, category pages, help pages and DDOwiki policy pages are not articles.

Article title
See DDO: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.

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

The main namespace, article namespace or mainspace is the namespace of DDOwiki that contains "live" DDOwiki articles.

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 talk namespaces for discussing what the content of articles in mainspace should be;
 * the DDOwiki namespace, for material about meta subjects related to DDOwiki and is where policies, guidelines, and essays reside, as well as other "meta" topics about editing DDOwiki;
 * the DDOwiki talk namespace, for discussing what the content of pages in DDOwiki space should be, and interpretations of them;
 * the special namespace, whose pages are created by the software on demand (see );
 * the user namespace for pages that are used by individual DDOwiki writers (example, User:Example).
 * the file namespace which is used for describing and attributing images (example, File:DDOwikibannerUA.png)
 * the MediaWiki namespace which is used to define shortcuts and other text strings used around DDOwiki (example MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning)
 * 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:DDOwiki" is the talk page for DDOwiki's article on DDOwiki itself.