What is a good article?
A good article has the following attributes:
- It is well written - compelling prose, comprehensible to an intelligent layman, with any jargon accompanied by a short description in plain words; and structured with a lead section and a proper system of heirarchical headings;
- It is factually accurate - its content should be verifiable with good quality sources cited. Although citing of sources is essential, inline citations are not mandatory;
- It uses a neutral point of view - it is uncontroversial in its neutrality and factual accuracy;
- It is stable - does not change significantly from day to day and is not the subject of ongoing edit wars;
- be referenced, and
- wherever possible, it contains images to illustrate it. The images will all be appropriately tagged and will have succinct captions. Lack of images does not prevent an article being good.
Length of good articles
A good article may be any length. However, for very short articles authors might consider whether it is more appropriate to merge the article into a large topic, while for substantial articles (20Kb+), the more rigorous reviewing of Wikipedia:Featured article candidates is probably more appropriate than the process here which works best with shorter articles.