[Wikipedia-l] Why are we deleting "articles"? (semantics and consistency issue)

[Daniel Mayer]

Concerning the page :[[Wikipedia:Article deletion log]] and several other 
willy-nilly uses of the word "article". 

Why in the world would we ever want to delete an article? I know we don't 
delete articles (as in encyclopedia articles) but others may not be aware of 
this. It is already difficult enough to explain the difference between 
certain types of wikipedia-specific pages, mere definition pages, vandalized 
pages and an actual encyclopedia articles without added confusion. 

As Larry often said, every page in wikipedia is a page but not every page is 
an article (or something like that). We needn't add un-needed confusion by 
loosely using the word "article" for every page. This also effects the 
proposed new wording of the front page which will read "anyone can edit any 
article" -- which is a completely true statement if we stick with Larry's 
definition and the criteria used by the statistics to estimate the number of 
articles in the database.

Our statistics currently reads (with added emphasis by me):

"There 63416 total /pages/ in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages 
about Wikipedia, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably 
don't qualify as /articles/. Excluding those, there are 35128 pages that are 
probably legitimate /articles/."

Why then does the save button always say "save article"?

--mav