Wikipedia Article

Article (publishing)

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For Wikipedia guidelines, see Wikipedia:What is an article. This article's lead section may not adequately summarize its contents. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of the article's key points. (June 2010)

An article is a written work published in a print or electronic medium. It may be for the purpose of propagating the news, research results, academic analysis or debate.Contents [hide]

1 News articles

2 Other types of articles

2.1 Text articles

2.2 Spoken articles

2.3 Listicles

3 Elements of an article

3.1 Headline

3.2 Byline

3.3 Lead

3.4 Body

3.5 Conclusion

4 Characteristics of well-written articles

5 Authorship

6 See also

7 Notes

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News articles

See also: News style

A news article discusses current or recent news of either general interest (i.e. daily newspapers) or of a specific topic (i.e. political or trade news magazines, club newsletters, or technology news websites).

A news article can include accounts of eye witnesses to the happening event. It can contain photographs, accounts, statistics, graphs, recollections, interviews, polls, debates on the topic, etc. Headlines can be used to focus the reader's attention on a particular (or main) part of the article. The writer can also give facts and detailed information following answers to general questions like who, what, when, where, why and how.

Quoted references can also be helpful. References to people can also be made through written accounts of interviews and debates confirming the factuality of the writer's information and the reliability of his source. The writer can use redirection to ensure that the reader keeps reading the article and to draw her attention to other articles. For example, phrases like "Continued on page 3" redirect the reader to a page where the article is continued.

While a good conclusion is an important ingredient for newspaper articles, the immediacy of a deadline environment means that copy editing often takes the form of deleting everything past an arbitrary point in the story corresponding to the dictates of available space on a page. Therefore, newspaper reporters are trained to write in inverted pyramid style, with all the most important information in the first paragraph or two. If less vital details are pushed towards the end of the story, the potentially destructive impact of draconian copy editing will be minimized.

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Other types of articles

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Text articles

Academic paper — is an academic article published in an academic journal. The status of academics is often dependent both on how many articles they have had published and on the number of times that their articles are cited by authors of other articles.

Blog — Some styles of blog articles are more like articles. Other styles are written more like entries in a personal journal.

Encyclopedia article — In an encyclopedia or other reference work, an article is a primary division of content.

Marketing article — An often thin piece of content which is designed to draw the reader to a commercial website or product.

Usenet articles — are messages written in the style of e-mail and posted to an open moderated or unmoderated Usenet newsgroup.

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Spoken articles

In the general context, this term refers to articles produced in the form of audio recordings. They are also referred to as podcasts.

With reference to Wikipedia, this term usually refers to audio recordings of Wikipedia articles. These are produced by members of WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia.

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Listicles

Articles