Wikipedia:Vital articles/Frequently Asked Questions

This page provides answers to frequently asked questions about the Wikipedia:Vital articles lists. It also summarizes the current consensus surrounding the questions' answers.

Please:

• DO help us answer frequently asked questions about the article.
• DO use edit summaries to describe your changes on this page.
• DO NOT sign your edits on this page.
• DO NOT discuss anything on this page. Conduct discussions on the Wikipedia talk:Vital articles page.

What are these lists?

Vital Articles are lists of subjects for which Wikipedia should ultimately have corresponding featured-class articles. They serve as centralized watchlists to track the quality status of Wikipedia's most important articles and to give editors guidance on which articles to prioritize for improvement. These articles span the breadth of human knowledge and are divided into various subject areas. The articles listed represent the most important and fundamental articles to the English Wikipedia within each subject area.

What makes an article "vital"?

A vital article is one considered essential to the structure of Wikipedia. There is no longstanding consensus as to what exactly this means, or how to determine which articles are critical to Wikipedia's structure. Several methods of determining vitality are listed below, but they are not ironclad. Feel free to add to the list.

1. Coverage: Vital articles at higher levels tend to "cover" more topics, i.e. be more broad and general, than articles at lower levels. For example, Science will always be a Vital-1 article. Scientific method, while important to science, is a more specific idea (and therefore not more important) than science itself, and falls into a lower level of vitality. Determining which articles are vital at lower levels often involves looking at the articles at higher levels. For example, since History is of high vitality, World War II is also a vital article, just at a lower level. Since Language is of high vitality, Grammar is also vital, since it is difficult to discuss language without grammar. There can be exceptions to the coverage rule. For example, at the time of writing this, Geology is of higher vitality than Earth science, and Democracy is of higher vitality than Civics.
2. Essential to Wikipedia's other articles: While Scientific method may be less vital than Science, since it is such a critical topic in regard to science, it absolutely is a vital article, just not Vital-1.
3. Views: In order to see a page's view counts (in the past 30 days), one can click on "Page information" on the right of the page. In theory, the amount of views a page receives points to it being critical to Wikipedia's structure. However, this is hardly the case. View counts are by no means a definitive marker of vitality and should be approached with caution. In general, view counts should only be compared across similar articles. Recent events and popular celebrities tend to receive views that aren't necessarily "critical to Wikipedia's structure views" as the popularity of these pages is temporary and often irrelevant to Wikipedia's other articles.
4. Notability: Individuals within the People section represent the pinnacles of their field, such as Albert Einstein in "Inventors and scientists" or William Shakespeare in "Authors". While perhaps we would like to list only nice people that made the world a better place, this is not always the case when it comes to notability, e.g. Adolf Hitler is currently a Vital-3 article.
5. No (Western) bias: This vitals list is for English Wikipedia. While one may think this would require there to be English-speaking bias, we seek to address such systemic biases and instead promote a comprehensive view of world events. For example, the current consensus is to list two cities in China (Hong Kong, Beijing) and India (Delhi, Mumbai), but only one in the United States. In sections such as those pertaining to People, History, or Geography, weight is given to some articles to produce a more diverse, global list.

What are the levels, and how do they work?

There are currently 5 different levels of vital articles:

• Level 1: 10 articles
• Level 2: 100 articles (10 articles from Level 1 + 90 more)
• Level 3: 1,000 articles (100 articles from Level 2 + 900 more)
• Level 4: 10,000 articles (1,000 articles from Level 3 + 9,000 more)
• Level 5: 50,000 articles (10,000 articles from Level 4 + 40,000 more)

Higher level articles are considered to be more important and fundamental than are lower level articles. For example, human history (a level 1 article) is considered to be more vital than ancient history (a level 2 article), and ancient history is considered to be more vital than Bronze Age (a level 3 article). Levels are determined by the same consensus-based process through which articles are selected as vital articles.

All articles from higher levels are also included in lower levels. For example, all 100 subjects on the Level 2 list are also included in Level 3, and the Level 2 list includes all 10 subjects in Level 1.

The article counts listed above for each level are target numbers, so the actual number of vital articles may vary from the target number. Levels 4 and 5 also have target numbers within each subject area listed on their main pages. These target numbers are also determined through a consensus-based process. Level 5 is a work in progress and is currently well below the target number in some categories.

Why does the list exist?

The English Wikipedia Vital Articles lists serve several useful functions for the community:

• They give the English Wikipedia a direction in which to work, to enhance the quality of the encyclopedia in the most essential areas.
• They provide a measurement of the English Wikipedia's quality, allowing the community to determine which areas are lacking in high-quality articles and which areas Wikipedia is excelling in.
• They serve as centralized watchlists for the English Wikipedia's most important articles, giving editors the chance to see which fields need the most help.

Who created the list?

The English Wikipedia Vital Articles list was originally created in August 2004 by David Gerard (talk · contribs) as an adaptation of the metawiki List of articles every Wikipedia should have, created by Danny (talk · contribs) in May 2004 on Meta – back when not even English Wikipedia had all of these articles. The original version on en:wp was copied from the version on Simple, and then adapted locally. Danny had an interest in core material and also set up Danny's contest (third incarnation) in 2006 and the Core Contest in 2007.

Elsewhere, Wikipedia:1,000 core topics was established in 2006 as part of the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team for an offline version of wikipedia and later merged into level 3 of Vital Articles.

The Vital Articles list has undergone numerous revisions by multiple editors, and has expanded to include 5 different levels of vitalness. It began with what is now level 3 in 2004, level 4 in 2006, levels 1 and 2 in 2009, and level 5 in 2017.

WikiProject Vital Articles was established in 2009 by Drilnoth.

Some editors on Wikimedia are currently preparing a similar project around automating classification of article importance.

How are articles selected?

There are no "set in stone" rules for what makes an article vital. Since it encompasses so many topics, a single overarching criterion for inclusion would be irresponsible. Over time, however, certain commonly held notions have become prevalent. This applies especially to the most frequently revised area, the People section. The articles selected for the project are identified through a voting process, which any member of the community is open to participate in. All levels except for level 5 require five or more support votes and a two-thirds majority for a topic to be added or removed.

• Geographic diversity: since this is the English language Wikipedia, the majority of editors come from either the United States or the Commonwealth. This creates a systemic bias towards topics better known in the Western world. To counter this, the list includes a number of important topics less-known to the average American or Brit.
  • The Countries subsection primarily includes countries featuring either one of the highest GDPs in the world, or one of the highest populations.
• Chronological diversity: The topics represent the entirety of human history. To facilitate this, the Level 3 People and History subsections are sorted chronologically, not alphabetically.
• Relative vitalness: Since there is a hard limit on the number of articles at each level, articles are judged against each other within the same subject areas to determine which articles are more vital to list than others.
• Anti-recentism: Of the 132 individuals currently in the Level 3 People section, none are still living. While living individuals such as Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump have tremendous current notability, they are avoided at Level 3 because their place in history is difficult to ascertain.

How do I update an article's status?

An article's status is indicated with a symbol immediately before the article name. These symbols are automatically updated by User:cewbot based on the Wikiproject quality assessments on the articles' talk pages.

How do I add articles to the list/remove articles from WP:VITAL?

To add or remove articles from Levels 1–4, please propose your article(s) under a new section on the talk page of the Level you think they should be added to or removed from. Until Level 5 reaches capacity, articles may be added BOLDly, but those articles still may be removed by a consensus of four or more editors. Since there are a limited number of spaces available, additions should ideally also include which article(s) would be replaced. Be sure to clearly explain your reasons for the replacement, and if the articles are good articles or featured articles, please notify the editors who nominated them at those processes. Please do not propose replacing articles across subjects (e.g. replacing Yoga with Tamerlane) lightly and without an explanation for doing so.

Some notes about our maintainer User:Cewbot:

• The bot only updates counter with the pattern "(000 articles)" in section title.
• All attributes of articles are fetched from corresponding categories.
• The bot will automatically update the summary table if there are summary table marks. Please refer to Wikipedia:Vital articles#Summary for an example of a summary table.
• Every time you modify main sections, please adjust User:Cewbot/log/20200122/configuration#Topics as well! This will avoid articles being listed in Category:All Wikipedia vital articles in an unknown topic.