Class | Criteria | Reader's experience | Editing suggestions | Example | ||
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Featured article FA | The article has attained featured article status by passing an official review.
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Professional, outstanding, and thorough; a definitive source for encyclopedic information. | No further content additions should be necessary unless new information becomes available; further improvements to the prose quality are often possible. | Template:Oldid (as of August 2014) |
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A-Class article A | The article is well organized and essentially complete, having been reviewed by impartial reviewers from this WikiProject or elsewhere. Good article status is not a requirement for A-Class.
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Very useful to readers. A fairly complete treatment of the subject. A non-expert in the subject would typically find nothing wanting. | Expert knowledge may be needed to tweak the article, and style problems may need solving. Peer review may help. | Template:Oldid (as of June 2014) |
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File:Symbol support vote.svg GA | The article has attained good article status by passing an official review.
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Useful to nearly all readers, with no obvious problems; approaching (but not equalling) the quality of a professional encyclopedia. | Some editing by subject and style experts is helpful; comparison with an existing featured article on a similar topic may highlight areas where content is weak or missing. | Template:Oldid (as of August 2014) |
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Bplus | Detailed, clear and accessible, often with history or images; possible good article nominee.
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Useful to nearly all readers. A good treatment of the subject, which attempts to be as accessible as possible, with a minimum of jargon. No obvious problems, gaps, excessive information. | May be improved by input from experts to assess where coverage is still missing, and also by illustrations, historical background, and further references. Consider peer review or nominating for good article status. If the article is not already fully wikified, now is the time. | Template:Oldid (as of December 2010) |
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B | The article is mostly complete and without major problems, but requires some further work to reach good article standards.
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Readers are not left wanting, although the content may not be complete enough to satisfy a serious student or researcher. | A few aspects of content and style need to be addressed. Expert knowledge may be needed. The inclusion of supporting materials should also be considered if practical, and the article checked for general compliance with the Manual of Style and related style guidelines. | Template:Oldid (as of August 2014) |
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C | The article is substantial, but is still missing important content or contains much irrelevant material. The article should have some references to reliable sources, but may still have significant problems or require substantial cleanup.
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Useful to a casual reader, but would not provide a complete picture for even a moderately detailed study. | Considerable editing is needed to close gaps in content and solve cleanup problems. | Template:Oldid (as of August 2014) |
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Start | An article that is developing, but which is quite incomplete. It might or might not cite adequate reliable sources.
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Provides some meaningful content, but most readers will need more. | Providing references to reliable sources should come first; the article also needs substantial improvement in content and organisation. Also improve the grammar, spelling, writing style and improve the jargon use. | Template:Oldid (as of February 2014) |
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Stub | A very basic description of the topic. However, all very-bad-quality articles will fall into this category.
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Provides very little meaningful content; may be little more than a dictionary definition. Readers may probably see insufficiently developed features of the topic and does not see how the features of the topic are significant. | Any editing or additional material can be helpful. The provision of meaningful content should be a priority. The best solution for a Stub-class Article to step up to a Start-class Article is to add in referenced reasons of why the topic is significant. | Template:Oldid (as of February 2013) |
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Featured list FL | The article has attained featured list status.
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Professional standard; it comprehensively covers the defined scope, usually providing a complete set of items, and has annotations that provide useful and appropriate information about those items. | No further content additions should be necessary unless new information becomes available. | Template:Oldid (as of April 2014) |
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List | Meets the criteria of a stand-alone list, which is an article that contains primarily a list, usually consisting of links to articles in a particular subject area. | There is no set format for a list, but its organization should be logical and useful to the reader. | Lists should be lists of live links to Wikipedia articles, appropriately named and organized. | Template:Oldid (as of January 2013) |
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Future | A topic about which details are subject to change often.
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Amount of meaningful content varies over time as the projected event draws near. | Material added might be speculation and should be carefully sourced. | Template:Oldid (as of July 2014) |
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Book | A collection of Wikipedia articles arranged as a book (see Wikipedia Books).
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People who would like to read Wikipedia offline, or in print. | It is a good idea to team up with a relevant WikiProject to gather feedback on books. | Template:Oldid (as of October 2011) |
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Category | Any category falls under this class. | Categories are mainly used to group together articles within a particular subject area. | Large categories may need to be split into one or more subcategories. Be wary of articles that have been miscategorized. | Category:Software | ||
Disambig | Any disambiguation page falls under this class. | The page serves to distinguish multiple articles that share the same (or similar) title. | Additions should be made as new articles of that name are created. Pay close attention to the proper naming of such pages, as they often do not need "(disambiguation)" appended to the title. | Template:Oldid (as of July 2014) |
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Featured media FM | Featured pages in the file namespace falls under this class. | The page contains a featured image, sound clip or other media-related content. | Make sure that the file is properly licensed and credited. | File:American World War II senior military officials, 1945.JPEG | ||
File | Any page in the file namespace falls under this class. | The page contains an image, a sound clip or other media-related content. | Make sure that the file is properly licensed and credited. | File:Musk Lorikeet jul08.jpg | ||
Portal | Any page in the portal namespace falls under this class. | Portals are intended to serve as "main pages" for specific topics. | Editor involvement is essential to ensure that portals are kept up to date. | Portal:Science | ||
Project | All WikiProject-related pages fall under this class. | Project pages are intended to aid editors in article development, and are probably not useful to readers. | Develop these pages into collaborative resources useful for improving articles within the project. | Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history | ||
Redirect | Any redirect falls under this class. | The page redirects to another article with a similar name, related topic or that has been merged the original article at this location. | Editor involvement is essential to ensure that articles are not mis-classified as redirects, and that redirects are not mis-classified as articles. | |||
Template | Any template falls under this class. The most common types of template include infoboxes and navboxes. | Different types of template serve different purposes. Infoboxes provide easy access to key pieces of information about the subject. Navboxes are for the purpose of grouping together related subjects into an easily accessible format, to assist the user in navigating between articles. | Infoboxes are typically placed at the upper right of an article, while navboxes normally go across the very bottom of a page. Beware of too many different templates, as well as templates that give either too little, too much, or too specialized information. | Template:Martial arts | ||
NA | Any non-article page that fits no other classification. | The page contains no article content, and is probably not useful to any casual reader. | Look out for misclassified articles. Currently many NA-class articles need to be re-classified. |